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HE STEREOSCOPE 
AND STEREOSCOPIC 
PHOTOGRAPHS m 


/ 

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 


* 

THIRD EDITION 

¥ 


UNDERWOOD & UNDERWOOD 
New York and London 

Ottawa, Kans. Toronto, Can. 


U 





32409 


Copyright, 1898, by Underwood & Underwood 
Copyright, 1899, by Underwood & Underwood 


TWO COPIES RECEIVED. 



dr. holmes’s articles 

BY PERMISSION OF 
MESSRS. HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 
PUBLISHERS OF ATLANTIC MONTHLY 

v<w v 







INTRODUCTION 


f^ERTAINLY no one need to apologize for 
calling particular attention to articles from 
the pen of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Indeed, we 
believe that we shall be doing something for the 
cause of general education if we are able to se¬ 
cure a wider acquaintance with Dr. Holmes’s 
convictions as to the use and value of stereoscopic 
photographs. Other thinkers might be quoted, 
but it will be seen from Dr. Holmes’s discussion 
of the question that the stereoscope must have 
an important part to play in educational work, 
both in and out of the schools,—a part, the possi¬ 
bilities of which it is by no means so easy to ap¬ 
preciate or determine as has been supposed. 

There are three distinct reasons for re-publish¬ 
ing these articles: 

(i) To show the utter absurdity of many wide¬ 
spread misconceptions, as, for instance, that ste¬ 
reoscopic photographs are of importance mainly 
as means for amusement and entertainment 
rather than for education. 


INTRODUCTION. 


(2) To give an example of intelligent apprecia¬ 
tion of stereoscopic views; as well as their possi¬ 
bilities to a person who does appreciate them. 

(3) To show, what few people know,—the cor¬ 
rect way to use stereoscopic views. 

Though always happy in his treatment of a 
subject, still the wonders and possibilities of the 
stereoscope impressed Dr. Holmes strongly, and 
the following articles furnish one of the best 
examples of delightful expression and keen and 
prophetic insight. 


THE STEREOSCOPE 

AND THE 


STEREOGRAPH 


T^l EMOCRITUS of Abdera, commonly known as the 
* Laughing Philosopher, probably because he did 
not consider the study of truth inconsistent with a 
cheerful countenance, believed and taught that all bodies 
were continually throwing off certain images like them¬ 
selves, which subtile emanations, striking on our bodily 
organs, gave rise to our sensations. Epicurus bor¬ 
rowed the idea from him, and incorporated it into the 
famous system, of which Lucretius has given us the 
most popular version. Those who are curious on the 
matter will find the poet’s description at the beginning 
of his fourth book. Forms, effigies, membranes, or 
films, are the nearest representatives of the terms ap¬ 
plied to these effluences. They are perpetually shed 
from the surfaces of solids, as bark is shed by trees. 
Cortex is, indeed, one of the names applied to them by 
Lucretius. 

These evanescent films may be seen in one of their 
aspects in any clear, calm sheet of water, in a mirror, 
in the eye of an animal by one who looks at it in front, 
but better still by the consciousness behind the eye in 
the ordinary act of vision. They must be packed like 
the leaves of a closed book; for suppose a mirror to 
give an image of an object a mile off, it will give one 



6 


THE STEREOSCOPE AND THE STEREOGRAPH. 


at every point less than a mile, though this were sub¬ 
divided into a million parts. Yet the images will not 
be the same; for the one taken a mile off will be very 
small, at half a mile as large again, at a hundred feet 
fifty times as large, and so on, as long as the mirror can 
contain the image. 

Under the action of light, then, a body makes its 
superficial aspect potentially present at a distance, be¬ 
coming appreciable as a shadow or as a picture. But 
remove the cause,—the body itself,—and the effect is 
removed. The man beholdeth himself in the glass and 
goeth his way, and straightway both the mirror and 
the mirrored forget what manner of man he was. These 
visible films or membranous exuviae of objects, which 
the old philosophers talked about, have no real exist¬ 
ence, separable from their illuminated source, and per¬ 
ish instantly when it is withdrawn. 

If a man had handed a metallic speculum to Demo¬ 
critus of Abdera, and told him to look at his face in it 
while his heart was beating thirty or forty times, prom¬ 
ising that one of the films his face was shedding should 
stick there, so that neither he, nor it, nor anybody 
should forget what manner of man he was, the Laugh¬ 
ing Philosopher would probably have vindicated his 
claim to his title by an explosion that would have as¬ 
tonished the speaker. 

This is just what the Daguerreotype has done. It 
has fixed the most fleeting of our illusions, that which 
the apostle and the philosopher and the poet have alike 
used as the type of instability and unreality. The photo- 


THE STEREOSCOPE AND THE STEREOGRAPH. 


7 


graph has completed the triumph by making a sheet 
oi paper reflect images like a mirror and hold them as a 
picture. 

This triumph of human ingenuity is the most auda¬ 
cious, remote, improbable, incredible,—the one that 
would seem least likely to be regained, if all traces of it 
were lost, of all the discoveries man has made. It has 
become such an everyday matter with us, that we forget 
its miraculous nature, as we forget that of the sun itself, 
to which we owe the creations of our new art. Yet in 
all the prophecies of dreaming enthusiasts, in all the 
random guesses of the future conquests over matter, we 
do not remember any prediction of such an incon¬ 
ceivable wonder, as our neighbor round the corner, or 
the proprietor of the small house on wheels, standing 
on the village common, will furnish any of us for the 
most painfully slender remuneration. No Century of 
Inventions includes this among its possibilities. Noth¬ 
ing but the vision of a Laputan, who passed his days in 
extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, could have 
reached such a height of delirium as to rave about th< 
time when a man should paint his miniature by looking 
at a blank tablet, and a multitudinous wilderness of 
forest foliage or an endless Babel of roofs and spirev 
stamp itself, in a moment, so faithfully and so minutely, 
that one may creep over the surface of the picture with 
his microscope and find every leaf perfect, or read the 
letters of distant signs, and see what was the play at 
the “ Varietes ” or the “ Victoria,” on the evening of 
the day when it was taken, just as he would sweep the 


8 


THE STEREOSCOPE AND THE STEREOGRAPH. 


real view with a spy-glass to explore all that it contains. 

Some years ago, we sent a page or two to one of the 
magazines,—the “ Knickerbocker,” if we remember 
aright,—in which the story was told from the “ Arabian 
Nights,” of the three kings’ sons, who each wished to 
obtain the hand of a lovely princess, and received for 
answer, that he who brought home the most wonderful 
object should obtain the lady’s hand as his reward. Our 
readers, doubtless, remember the original tale, with the 
flying carpet, the tube which showed what a distant 
friend was doing by looking into it, and the apple 
which gave relief to the most desperate sufferings only 
by inhalation of its fragrance. The railroad-car, the 
telegraph, and the apple-flavored chloroform could and 
do realize, every day,—as was stated in the passage re¬ 
ferred to, with a certain rhetorical amplitude not doubt¬ 
fully suggestive of the lecture-room,—all that was 
fabled to have been done by the carpet, the tube, and 
the fruit of the Arabian story. 

All these inventions force themselves upon us to the 
full extent of their significance. It is therefore hardly 
necessary to waste any considerable amount of rhetoric 
upon wonders that are so thoroughly appreciated. 
When human art says to each one of us, I will give you 
ears that can hear a whisper in New Orleans, and legs 
that can walk six hundred miles in a day, and if, in 
consequence of any defect of rail or carriage, you should 
be so injured that your own very insignificant walking 
members must be taken off, I can make the surgeon’s 
visit a pleasant dream for you, on awaking from which 


THE STEREOSCOPE AND THE STEREOGRAPH. 


9 


you will ask when he is coming to do that which he has 
done already,—what is the use of poetical or rhetorical 
amplification? But this other invention of the mirror 
with a memory, and especially that application of it 
which has given us the wonders of the stereoscope, is 
not so easily, completely, universally recognized in all 
the immensity of its applications and suggestions. The 
stereoscope, and the pictures it gives, are, however, 
common enough to be in the hands of many of our 
readers; and as many of those who are not acquainted 
with it must before long become as familiar with it as 
they are now with friction-matches, we feel sure that a 
few pages relating to it will not be unacceptable. 

Our readers may like to know the outlines of the proc¬ 
ess of making daguerreotypes and photographs, as 
just furnished us by Mr. Whipple, one of the most suc¬ 
cessful operators in this country. We omit many of 
those details which are everything to the practical 
artist, but nothing to the general reader. We must 
premise, that certain substances undergo chemical al¬ 
terations, when exposed to the light, which produce a 
change of color. Some of the compounds of silver 
possess this faculty to a remarkable degree,—as the 
common indelible marking-ink, (a solution of nitrate of 
silver,) which soon darkens in the light, shows us every 
day. This is only one of the innumerable illustrations 
of the varied effects of light on color. A living plant 
owes its brilliant hues to the sunshine; but a dead one, 
or the tints extracted from it, will fade in the same rays 
which clothe the tulip in crimson and gold,—as our 


IO 


THE STEREOSCOPE AND THE STEREOGRAPH. 


lady-readers who have rich curtains in their drawing¬ 
rooms know full well. The sun, then, is a master of 
chiaroscuro, and, if he has a living petal for his pallet, is 
the first of colorists.—Let us walk into his studio, and 
examine some of his painting machinery. 

i. The Daguerreotype. —A silver-plated sheet of 
copper is resilvered by electro-plating, and perfectly 
polished. It is then exposed in a glass box to the 
vapor of iodine until its surface turns to a golden yel¬ 
low. Then it is exposed in another box to the fumes 
of the bromide of lime until it becomes of a blood-red 
tint. Then it is exposed once more, for a few seconds, 
to the vapor of iodine. The plate is now sensitive to 
light, and is of course kept from it, until, having been 
placed in the darkened camera, the screen is withdrawn 
and the camera picture falls upon it. In strong light, 
and with the best instruments, three seconds’ exposure is 
enough,—but the time varies with circumstances. The 
plate is now withdrawn and exposed to the vapor of 
mercury at 212 degrees. Where the daylight was 
strongest, the sensitive coating of the plate has under¬ 
gone such a chemical change, that the mercury pene¬ 
trates readily to the silver, producing a minute white 
granular deposit upon it, like a very thin fall of snow, 
drifted by the wind. The strong lights are little heaps 
of these granules, the middle lights thinner sheets of 
them; the shades are formed by the dark silver itself, 
thinly sprinkled only, as the earth shows with a few 
scattered snow-flakes on its surface. The precise chem- 


THE STEREOSCOPE AND THE STEREOGRAPH. 


I 


ical nature of these granules we care less for than their 
palpable presence, which may be perfectly made out by 
a microscope magnifying fifty diameters or even less. 

The picture thus formed would soon fade under the 
action of light, in consequence of further changes in 
the chemical elements of the film of which it consists. 
Some of these elements are therefore removed by wash¬ 
ing it with a solution of hyposulphite of soda, after 
which it is rinsed with pure water. It is now perma¬ 
nent in the light, but a touch wipes off the picture as 
it does the bloom from a plum. To fix it, a solution 
of hyposulphite of soda containing chloride of gold is 
poured on the plate while this is held over a spirit- 
lamp. It is then again rinsed with pure water, and is 
ready for its frame. 

2. The Photograph.— Just as we must have a mold 
before we can make a cast, we must get a negative or 
reversed picture on glass before we can get our posi¬ 
tive or natural picture. The first thing, then, is to lay a 
sensitive coating on a piece of glass,—crown-glass, 
which has a natural surface, being preferable to plate- 
glass. Collodion, which is a solution of gun-cotton in 
alcohol and ether, mingled with a solution of iodide 
and bromide of potassium, is used to form a thin coat¬ 
ing over the glass. Before the plate is dry, it is dipped 
into a solution of nitrate of silver, where it remains from 
one to three or four minutes. Here, then, we have es* 
sentially the same chemical elements that we have seen 
employed in the daguerreotype,—namely, iodine, bro- 


12 


THE STEREOSCOPE AND THE STEREOGRAPH. 


mine, and silver; and by their mutual reactions in the 
last process we have formed the sensitive iodide and 
bromide of silver. The glass is now placed, still wet, 
in the camera, and there remains from three seconds to 
one or two minutes, according to circumstances. It is 
then washed with a solution of sulphate of iron. Every 
light spot in the camera-picture becomes dark on the 
sensitive coating of the glass-plate. But where the 
shadows or dark parts of the camera-picture fall, the 
sensitive coating is less darkened, or not at all, if the 
shadows are very deep, and so these shadows of the 
camera-picture become the lights of the glass-picture, 
as the lights become the shadows. Again, the picture is 
reversed, just as in every camera-obscura where the 
image is received on a screen direct from the lens. 
Thus the glass plate has the right part of the object on 
the left side of its picture, and the left part on its right 
side; its light is darkness, and its darkness is light. 
Everything is just as wrong as it can be, except that 
the relations of each wrong to the other wrongs are like 
the relations of the corresponding rights to each other 
in the original natural image. This is a negative pic¬ 
ture. 

Extremes meet. Every given point of the picture is 
as far from truth as a lie can be. But in traveling away 
from the pattern it has gone round a complete circle, 
and is at once as remote from Nature and as near it as 
possible.—“ How far is it to Taunton? ” said a country¬ 
man, who was walking exactly the wrong way to reach 
that commercial and piscatory center.—“ ’Baout twen 


THE STEREOSCOPE AND THE STEREOGRAPH. 


13 


ty-five thaousan’ mild,”—said the boy he asked,—“ ’ fy’ 
go ’z y’ Y goin’ naow, ’n’ ’baout haaf a mild ’f y’ turn 
right raoun’ ’n’ go t’other way.” 

The negative picture being formed, it is washed with 
a solution of hyposulphite of soda, to remove the soluble 
principles which are liable to decomposition. * * 

This negative is now to give birth to a positive ,—this 
mass of contradictions to assert its hidden truth in a 
perfect harmonious affirmation of the realities of Na¬ 
ture. Behold the process! 

A sheet of the best linen paper is dipped in salt water 
and suffered to dry. Then a solution of nitrate of silver 
is poured over it and it is dried in a dark place. This 
paper is now sensitive; it has a conscience, and is 
afraid of daylight. Press it against the glass negative 
and lay them in the sun, the glass uppermost, leaving 
them so for from three to ten minutes. The paper, hav¬ 
ing the picture formed on it, is then washed with the 
solution of hyposulphite of soda, rinsed in pure water, 
soaked again in a solution of hyposulphite of soda, to 
which, however, the chloride of gold has been added, 
and again rinsed. It is then sized or varnished. 

Out of the perverse and totally depraved negative,— 
where it might almost seem as if some magic and 
diabolic power had wrenched all things from their 
proprieties, where the light of the eye was darkness, 
and the deepest blackness was gilded with the brightest 
glare,—is to come the true end of all this series of oper¬ 
ations, a copy of Nature in all her sweet gradations and 
harmonies and contrasts. 


14 THE STEREOSCOPE AND THE STEREOGRAPH. 

We owe the suggestion to a great wit, who over¬ 
flowed our small intellectual home-lot with a rushing 
freshet of fertilizing talk the other day,—one of our 
friends, who quarries thought on his own premises, but 
does not care to build his blocks into books and es¬ 
says,—that perhaps this world is only the negative of 
that better one in which lights will be turned to shad¬ 
ows and shadows into light, but all harmonized, so that 
we shall see why these ugly patches, these misplaced 
gleams and blots, were wrought into the temporary ar¬ 
rangements of our planetary life. 

For, lo! when the sensitive paper is laid in the sun 
under the negative glass, every dark spot on the glass 
arrests a sunbeam, and so the spot of the paper lying 
beneath remains unchanged; but every light space of 
the negative lets the sunlight through, and the sensitive 
paper beneath confesses its weakness, and betrays it by 
growing dark just in proportion to the glare that strikes 
upon it. So, too, we have only to turn the glass before 
laying it on the paper, and we bring all the natural 
relations of the object delineated back again,—its right 
to the right of the picture, its left to the picture’s left. 

On examining the glass negative by transmitted light 
with a power of a hundred diameters, we observe minute 
granules, whether crystalline or not we cannot say, very 
similar to those described in the account of the daguerre¬ 
otype. But now their effect is reversed. Being 
opaque, they darken the glass wherever they are accu¬ 
mulated, just as the snow darkens our skylights. Where 
these particles are drifted, therefore, we have our shad- 


THE STEREOSCOPE AND THE STEREOGRAPH. 


5 


ows, and where they are thinly scattered, our lights. On 
examining the paper photographs, we have found no 
distinct granules, but diffused stains of deeper or lighter 
shades. 

Such is the sun-picture, in the form in which we now 
most commonly meet it,—for the daguerreotype, per¬ 
fect and cheap as it is, and admirably adapted for 
miniatures, has almost disappeared from the field of 
landscape, still life, architecture, and genre painting, to 
make room for the photograph. Mr. Whipple tells us 
that even now he takes a much greater number of 
miniature portraits on metal than on paper; and yet, 
except occasionally a statue, it is rare to see anything 
besides a portrait shown in a daguerreotype. But the 
greatest number of sun-pictures we see are the photo¬ 
graphs which are intended to be looked at with the aid 
of the instrument we are next to describe, and to the 
stimulus of which the recent vast extension of photo¬ 
graphic copies of Nature and Art is mainly owing. 

3. The Stereoscope. —This instrument was invented 
by Professor Wheatstone, and first described by him in 
1838. It was only a year after this that M. Daguerre 
made known his discovery in Paris; and almost at the 
same time Mr. Fox Talbot sent his communication to 
the Royal Society, giving an account of his method of 
obtaining pictures on paper by the action of light. 
Iodine was discovered in 1811, bromine in 1826, chloro¬ 
form in 1831, gun-cotton, from which collodion is made, 
in 1846, the electro-plating process about the same time 


16 THE STEREOSCOPE AND THE STEREOGRAPH. 

with photography; “all things, great and small, work¬ 
ing together to produce what seemed at first as de¬ 
lightful, but as fabulous, as Aladdin’s ring, which is 
now as little suggestive of surprise as our daily bread ” 

A stereoscope is an instrument which makes sur¬ 
faces look solid. All pictures in which perspective and 
light and shade are properly managed, have more or 
less of the effect of solidity; but by this instrument that 
effect is so heightened as to produce an appearance of 
reality which cheats the senses with its seeming truth. 

There is good reason to believe that the appreciation 
of solidity by the eye is purely a matter of education. 
The famous case of a young man who underwent the 
operation of couching for cataract, related by Chesel- 
den, and a similar one reported in the Appendix to 
Muller’s Physiology, go to prove that everything is 
seen only as a superficial extension, until the other 
senses have taught the eye to recognize depth, or the 
third dimension, which gives solidity, by converging 
outlines, distribution of light and shade, change of size, 
and of the texture of surfaces. Cheselden’s patient 
thought “all objects whatever touched his eyes, as 
what he felt did his skin.” The patient whose case is 
reported by Miiller could not tell the form of a cube 
held obliquely before his eye from that of a flat piece of 
pasteboard presenting the same outline. Each of these 
patients saw only with one eye,—the other being de¬ 
stroyed, in one case, and not restored to sight until long 
after the first, in the other case. In two months’ time 
Cheselden’s patient had learned to know solids; in fact, 


THE STEREOSCOPE AND THE STEREOGRAPH. 


7 


he argued so logically from light and shade and per¬ 
spective that he felt of pictures, expecting to find re¬ 
liefs and depressions, and was surprised to discover that 
they were flat surfaces. If these patients had suddenly 
recovered the sight of both eyes, they would probably 
have learned to recognize solids more easily and 
speedily. 

We can commonly tell whether an object is solid, 
readily enough with one eye, but still better with two 
eyes, and sometimes only by using both. If we look at 
a square piece of ivory with one eye alone, we cannot 
tell whether it is a scale of veneer, or the side of a cube, 
or the base of a pyramid, or the end of a prism. But 
if we now open the other eye, we shall see one or more 
of its sides, if it have any, and then know it to be a 
solid, and what kind of a solid. 

We see something with the second eye which we did 
not see with the first; in other words, the two eyes see 
different pictures of the same thing, for the obvious 
reason that they look from points two or three inches 
apart. By means of these two different views of an 
object, the mind, as it were, feels round it and gets an 
idea of its solidity. We clasp an object with our eyes, 
as with our arms, or with our hands, or with our 
thumb and finger, and then we know it to be something 
more than a surface. This, of course, is an illustration 
of the fact, rather than an explanation of its mechanism. 

Though, as we have seen, the two eyes look on two 
different pictures, we perceive but one picture. The 
two have run together and become blended in a third, 


l8 THE STEREOSCOPE AND T11E STEREOGRAPH. 

which shows us everything we see in each. But, in or¬ 
der that they should so run together, both the eye 
and the brain must be in a natural state. Push one eye 
a little inward with the forefinger, and the image is 
doubled, or at least confused. Only certain parts of the 
two retinae work harmoniously together, and you have 
disturbed their natural relations. Again, take two or 
three glasses more than temperance permits, and you 
see double; the eyes are right enough, probably, but 
the brain is in trouble, and does not report their tele¬ 
graphic messages correctly. These exceptions illus¬ 
trate the every-day truth, that, when we are in right 
condition, our two eyes see two somewhat different 
pictures, which our perception combines to form one 
picture, representing objects in all their dimensions, and 
not merely as surfaces. 

Now, if we can get two artificial pictures of any 
given object, one as we should see it with the right 
eye, the other as we should see it with the left eye, and 
then, looking at the right picture, and that only, with 
the right eye, and at the left picture, and that only, with 
the left eye, contrive some way of making these pictures 
run together as we have seen our two views of a natural 
object do, we shall get the sense of solidity that natural 
objects give us. The arrangement which effects it will 
be a stereoscope , according to our definition of that in¬ 
strument. How shall we attain these two ends? 

i. An artist can draw an object as he sees it, looking 
at it only with his right eye. Then he can draw a sec¬ 
ond view of the same object as he sees it with his left 


THE STEREOSCOPE AND THE STEREOGRAPH. 


19 


eye. It wilr not be hard to draw a cube or an octahe¬ 
dron in this way; indeed, the first stereoscopic figures 
were pairs of outlines, right and left, of solid bodies, 
thus drawn. But the minute details of a portrait, a 
group, or a landscape, all so nearly alike to the two 
eyes, yet not identical in each picture of our natural 
double view, would defy any human skill to reproduce 
them exactly. And just here comes in the photograph 
to meet the difficulty. A first picture of an object is 
taken,—then the instrument is moved a couple of inches 
or a little more, the distance between the human eyes, 
and a second picture is taken. Better than this, two 
pictures are taken at once in a double camera. 

We were just now stereographed, ourselves, at a mo¬ 
ment’s warning, as if we were fugitives from justice. A 
skeleton shape, of about a man’s height, its head cov¬ 
ered with a black veil, glided across the floor, faced us, 
lifted its veil, and took a preliminary look. When we 
had grown sufficiently rigid in our attitude of studied 
ease, and got our umbrella into a position of thoughtful 
carelessness, and put our features with much effort into 
an unconstrained aspect of cheerfulness tempered with 
dignity, of manly firmness blended with womanly sensi¬ 
bility, of courtesy, as much as to imply,—“You honor 
me, Sir,” toned or sized, as one may say, with some¬ 
thing of the self-assertion of a human soul which re¬ 
flects proudly, “ I am superior to all this,”—when, I 
say, we were all right, the spectral Mokanna dropped 
his long veil, and his waiting-slave put a sensitive tablet 
under its folds. The veil was then again lifted, and the 


20 THE STEREOSCOPE AND THE STEREOGRAPH. 

two great glassy eyes stared at us once more for some 
thirty seconds. The veil then dropped again; but in 
the mean time, the shrouded sorcerer had stolen our 
double image; we were immortal. Posterity might 
thenceforth inspect us, (if not otherwise engaged,) not 
as a surface only, but in all our dimensions as an un¬ 
disputed solid man of Boston. 

2. We have now obtained the double-eyed or twin 
pictures, or Stereograph, if we may coin a name. But 
the pictures are two, and we want to slide them into 
each other, so to speak, as in natural vision, that we 
may see them as one. How shall we make one picture 
out of two, the corresponding parts of which are sepa¬ 
rated by a distance of two or three inches? 

We can do this in two ways. First, by squinting as 
we look at them. But this is tedious, painful, and to 
some impossible, or at least very difficult. We shall 
find it much easier to look through a couple of glasses 
that squint for us. If at the same time they magnify the 
two pictures, we gain just so much in the distinctness 
of the picture, which, if the figures on the slide are 
small, is a great advantage. One of the easiest ways of 
accomplishing this double purpose is to cut a convex 
lens through the middle, grind the curves of the two 
halves down to straight lines, and join them by their 
thin edges. This is a squinting magniiier, and if ar¬ 
ranged so that with its right half we see the right pic¬ 
ture on the slide, and with its left half the left picture, 
it squints them both inward so that they run together 
and form a single picture. 


THE STEREOSCOPE AND THE STEREOGRAPH. 


21 


Such are the stereoscope and the photograph, by the 
aid of which form is henceforth to make itself seen 
through the world of intelligence, as thought has long 
made itself heard by means of the art of printing. The 
morphoiype, or form-print, must hereafter take its place 
by the side of the logotype or word-print. The stereo¬ 
graph, as we have called the double picture designed for 
the stereoscope, is to be the card of introduction to 
make all mankind acquaintances. 

The first effect of looking at a good photograph 
through the stereoscope is a surprise such as no paint¬ 
ing ever produced. The mind feels its way into the 
very depths of the picture. The scraggy branches of a 
tree in the foreground run out at us as if they would 
scratch our eyes out. The elbow of a figure stands forth 
so as to make us almost uncomfortable. Then there is 
such a frightful amount of detail, that we have the same 
sense of infinite complexity which Nature gives us. A 
painter shows us masses; the stereoscopic figure spares 
us nothing,—all must be there, every stick, straw, 
scratch, as faithfully as the dome of St. Peter’s, or the 
summit of Mont Blanc, or the ever-moving stillness of 
Niagara. The sun is no respecter of persons or of 
things. 

This is one infinite charm of the photographic de¬ 
lineation. Theoretically, a perfect photograph is abso¬ 
lutely inexhaustible. In a picture you can find nothing 
which the artist has not seen before you; but in a per¬ 
fect photograph there will be as many beauties lurking, 
unobserved, as there are flowers that blush unseen in 


22 THE STEREOSCOPE AND THE STEREOGRAPH. 

forests and meadows. It is a mistake to suppose one 
knows a stereoscopic picture when he has studied it a 
hundred times by the aid of the best of our common 
instruments. Do we know all that there is in a land¬ 
scape by looking out at it from our parlor-windows? 
In one of the glass stereoscopic views of Table Rock, 
two figures, so minute as to be mere objects of com¬ 
parison with the surrounding vastness, may be seen 
standing side by side. Look at the two faces with a 
strong magnifier, and you could identify their owners, 
if you met them in a court of law. 

Many persons suppose that they are looking on 
miniatures of the objects represented, when they see 
them in the stereoscope. They will be surprised to be 
told that they see most objects as large as they appear 
in Nature. A few simple experiments will show how 
what we see in ordinary vision is modified in our per¬ 
ceptions by what we think we see. We made a sham 
stereoscope, the other day, with no glasses, and an 
opening in the place where the pictures belong, about 
the size of one of the common stereoscopic pictures. 
Through this we got a very ample view of the town of 
Cambridge, including Mount Auburn and the Colleges, 
in a single field of vision. We do not recognize how 
minute distant objects really look to us, without some¬ 
thing to bring the fact home to our conceptions. A 
man does not deceive us as to his real size when we see 
him at the distance of the length of Cambridge Bridge. 
But hold a common black pin before the eyes at the 
distance of distinct vision, and one-twentieth of its 


THE STEREOSCOPE AND THE STEREOGRAPH. 


23 


length, nearest the point, is enough to cover him so that 
he can not be seen. The head of the same pin will 
cover one of the Cambridge horse-cars at the same dis¬ 
tance, and conceal the tower of Mount Auburn, as 
seen from Boston. 

We are near enough to an edifice to see it well, when 
we can easily read an inscription upon it. The stereo¬ 
scopic views of the arches of Constantine and of Titus 
give not only every letter of the old inscriptions, but 
render the grain of the stone itself. On the pediment of 
the Pantheon may be read, not only the words traced 
by Agrippa, but a rough inscription above it, scratched 
or hacked into the stone by some wanton hand during 
an insurrectionary tumult. 

This distinctness of the lesser details of a building or 
a landscape often gives us incidental truths which in¬ 
terest us mere than the central object of the picture. 
Here is Alloway Kirk, in the church-yard of which you 
may read a real story by the side of the ruin that tells 
of more romantic fiction. There stands the stone 
“ Erected by James Russell, seedsman, Ayr, in memory 
of his children,”—three little boys, James, and Thomas, 
and John, all snatched away from him in the space of 
three successive summer-days, and lying under the 
matted grass in the shadow of the old witch-haunted 
walls. It was Burns’s Alloway Kirk we paid for, and 
we find we have bought a share in the griefs of James 
Russell, seedsman; for is not the stone that tells this 
blinding sorrow of real life the true center of the pic¬ 
ture, and not the roofless pile which reminds us of an 
idle legend? 


24 THE STEREOSCOPE AND THE STEREOGRAPH. 

We have often found these incidental glimpses of 
life and death running away with us from the main ob¬ 
ject the picture was meant to delineate. The more evi¬ 
dently accidental their introduction, the more trivial 
they are in themselves, the more they take hold of the 
imagination. It is common to find an object in one of 
the twin pictures which we miss in the other; the person 
or the vehicle having moved in the interval of taking 
the two photographs. There is before us a view of 
the Pool of David at Hebron, in which a shadowy fig¬ 
ure appears at the water’s edge, in the right-hand 
farther corner of the right-hand picture only. This 
muffled shape stealing silently into the solemn scene 
has already written a hundred biographies in our im¬ 
agination. In the lovely glass stereograph of the Lake 
of Brienz, on the left-hand side, a vaguely hinted fe¬ 
male figure stands by the margin of the fair water; on 
the other side of the picture she is not seen. This is 
life; we seem to see her come and go. All the long¬ 
ings, passions, experiences, possibilities of womanhood 
animate that gliding shadow which has flitted through 
our consciousness, nameless, dateless, featureless, yet 
more profoundly real than the sharpest of portraits 
traced by a human hand. * * * 

Oh, infinite volumes of poems that I treasure in this 
small library of glass and pasteboard! I creep over the 
vast features of Rameses, on the face of his rock-hewn 
Nubian temple; I scale the huge mountain-crystal that 
calls itself the Pyramid of Cheops. I pace the length 
of the three Titanic stones of the wall of Baalbec,— 


THE STEREOSCOPE AND THE STEREOGRAPH. 


25 


mightiest masses of quarried rock that man has lifted 
into the air; and then I dive into some mass of foliage 
with my microscope, and trace the veinings of a leaf 
so delicately wrought in the painting not made with 
hands, that I can almost see its down and the green 
aphis that sucks its juices. I look into the eyes of the 
caged tiger, and on the scaly train of the crocodile, 
stretched on the sands of the river that has mirrored 
a hundred dynasties. I stroll through Rhenish vine¬ 
yards, I sit under Roman arches, I walk the streets of 
once buried cities, I look into the chasms of Alpine 
glaciers, and on the rush of wasteful cataracts. I pass, 
in a moment, from the banks of the Charles to the ford 
of the Jordan, and leave my outward frame in the arm¬ 
chair at my table, while in spirit I am looking down 
upon Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives. * * * 
The very things which an artist would leave out, or 
render imperfectly, the photograph takes infinite care 
with, and so makes its illusions perfect. What is the 
picture of a drum without the marks on its head where 
the beating of the sticks has darkened the parchment? 
In three pictures of the Ann Hathaway Cottage, before 
us,—the most perfect, perhaps, of all the paper stereo¬ 
graphs we have seen,—the door at the farther end of the 
cottage is open, and we see the marks left by the rub¬ 
bing of hands and shoulders as the good people came 
through the entry, or leaned against it, or felt for the 
latch. It is not impossible that scales from the epidermis 
of the trembling hand of Ann Hathaway’s young 
suitor, Will Shakespeare, are still adherent about the 


26 THE STEREOSCOPE AND THE STEREOGRAPH. 

old latch and door, and that they contribute to the 
stains we see in our picture. 

Among the accidents of life, as delineated in the 
stereograph, there is one that rarely fails in any ex¬ 
tended view which shows us the details of streets and 
buildings. There may be neither man nor beast nor 
vehicle to be seen. You may be looking down on a 
place in such a way that none of the ordinary marks 
of its being actually inhabited show themselves. But 
in the rawest Western settlement and the oldest East¬ 
ern city, in the midst of the shanties at Pike’s Peak and 
stretching across the court-yards as you look into them 
from above the clay-plastered roofs of Damascus, wher¬ 
ever man lives with any of the decencies of civilization, 
you will find the clothes-line. It may be a fence, (in 
Ireland,)—it may be a tree, (if the Irish license is still 
allowed us,)—but clothes-drying, or a place to dry 
clothes on, the stereoscopic photograph insists on find¬ 
ing, wherever it gives us a group of houses. This is 
the city of Berne. How it brings the people who sleep 
under that roof before us to see their sheets drying on 
that fence! and how real it makes the men in that house 
to look at their shirts hanging, arms down, from 
yonder line! * * * 

What is to come of the stereoscope and the photo¬ 
graph we are almost afraid to guess, lest we should 
seem extravagant. But, premising that we are to give 
a colored stereoscopic mental view of their prospects, 
we will venture on a few glimpses at a conceivable, if 
not a possible future. 


THE STEREOSCOPE AND THE STEREOGRAPH. 


27 


Form is henceforth divorced from matter. In fact, mat¬ 
ter as a visible object is of no great use any longer, ex¬ 
cept as the mold on which form is shaped. Give us a 
few negatives of a thing worth seeing, taken from differ¬ 
ent points of view, and that is all we want of it. Pull 
it down or burn it up, if you please. We must, perhaps, 
sacrifice some luxury in the loss of color; but form 
and light and shade are the great things, and even color 
can be added, and perhaps by and by may be got direct 
from Nature. 

There is only one Coliseum or Pantheon; but how 
many millions of potential negatives have they shed,— 
representatives of billions of pictures,—since they were 
erected! Matter in large masses must always be fixed 
and dear; form is cheap and transportable. We have 
got the fruit of creation now, and need not trouble our¬ 
selves with the core. Every conceivable object of Na¬ 
ture and Art will soon scale off its surface for us. Men 
will hunt all curious, beautiful, grand objects, as they 
hunt the cattle in South America, for their skins, and 
leave the carcasses as of little worth. 

The consequence of this will soon be such an enor¬ 
mous collection of forms that they will have to be 
classified and arranged in vast libraries, as books are 
now. The time will come when a man who wishes to 
see any object, natural or artificial, will go to the Im¬ 
perial, National, or City Stereographic Library and 
call for its skin or form, as he would for a book at any 
common library. We do now distinctly propose the 
creation of a comprehensive and systematic stereo- 


28 THE STEREOSCOPE AND THE STEREOGRAPH. 

graphic library, where all men can find the special 
forms they particularly desire to see as artists, or as 
scholars, or as mechanics, or in any other capacity. 
* * * 

Again, we must have special stereographic collec¬ 
tions, just as we have professional and other special 
libraries. And as a means of facilitating the formation 
of public and private stereographic collections, there 
must be arranged a comprehensive system of ex¬ 
changes, so that there may grow up something like a 
universal currency of these bank-notes, or promises to 
pay in solid substance, which the sun has engraved for 
the great Bank of Nature. 

To render comparison of similar objects, or of any 
that we may wish to see side by side, easy, there should 
be a stereographic metre or fixed standard of focal 
length for the camera lens, to furnish by its multiples or 
fractions, if necessary, the scale of distances, and the 
standard of power in the stereoscope lens. In this way 
the eye can make the most rapid and exact comparisons. 
If the “ great elm ” and the Cowthorpe oak, if the 
State-House and St. Peter’s, were taken on the same 
scale, and looked at with the same magnifying power, 
we should compare them without the possibility of be¬ 
ing misled by those partialities which might tend to 
make us overrate the indigenous vegetable and the 
dome of our native Michel Angelo. 

The next European war will send us stereographs of 
battles. It is asserted that a bursting shell can be pho¬ 
tographed. The time is perhaps at hand when a flash 


THE STEREOSCOPE AND THE STEREOGRAPH. 


2Q 


of light, as sudden and brief as that of the lightning 
which shows a whirling wheel standing stock still, shall 
preserve the very instant of the shock of contact of the 
mighty armies that are even now gathering. The light¬ 
ning from heaven does actually photograph natural ob¬ 
jects on the bodies of those it has just blasted,—so we 
are told by many witnesses. The lightning of clashing 
sabres and bayonets may be forced to stereotype itself 
in a stillness as complete as that of the tumbling tide of 
Niagara as we see it self-pictured. 

We should be led on too far, if we developed our be¬ 
lief as to the transformations to be wrought by this 
greatest of human triumphs over earthly conditions, the 
divorce of form and substance. Let our readers fill out 
a blank check on the future as they like,—we give our 
indorsement to their imaginations beforehand. We 
are looking into stereoscopes as pretty toys, and won¬ 
dering over the photograph as a charming novelty; but 
before another generation has passed away, it will be 
recognized that a new epoch in the history of human 
progress dates from the time when He who 

-never but in uncreated light 

Dwelt from eternity— 

took a pencil of fire from the hand of the “ angel stand¬ 
ing in the sun,” and placed it in the hands of a mortal. 


SUN-PAINTING 

AND 

SUN-SCULPTURE; 

WITH A STEREOSCOPIC TRIP ACROSS THE ATLANTIC 


S PHERE is one old fable which Lord Bacon, in his 
■ “ Wisdom of the Ancients,” has not interpreted. 

This is the flaying of Marsyas by Apollo. Every¬ 
body remembers the accepted version of it, namely,— 
that the young shepherd found Minerva’s flute, and 
was rash enough to enter into a musical contest with 
the God of Music. He was vanquished, of course,— 
and the story is, that the victor fastened him to a tree 
and flayed him alive. 

But the God of Song was also the God of Light, and 
a moment’s reflection reveals the true significance of 
this seemingly barbarous story. Apollo was pleased 
with his young rival, fixed him in position against an 
iron rest, (the tree of the fable,) and took a photograph, 
a sun-picture, of him. This thin film or skin of light and 
shade was absurdly interpreted as being the cutis, or 
untanned leather integument of the young shepherd. 
The human discovery of the art of photography en¬ 
ables us to rectify the error and restore that important 
article of clothing to the youth, as well as to vindicate 
the character of Apollo. There is one spot less upon the 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


31 


sun since the theft from heaven of Prometheus Da¬ 
guerre and his fellow-adventurers has enabled us to 
understand the ancient legen^. 

We are now flaying our friends and submitting to be 
flayed ourselves, every few years or months or days, by 
the aid of the trenchant sunbeam which performed the 
process for Marsyas. All the world has to submit to 
it,—kings and queens with the rest. The monuments of 
Art and the face of Nature herself are treated in the 
same way. We lift an impalpable scale from the sur¬ 
face of the Pyramids. We slip off from the dome of St. 
Peter’s that other imponderable dome which fitted it so 
closely that it betrays every scratch on the original. We 
skim off a thin, dry cuticle from the rapids of Niagara, 
and lay it on our unmoistened paper without breaking 
a buble or losing a speck of foam. We steal a land¬ 
scape from its lawful owners, and defy the charge of 
dishonesty. We skin the flints by the wayside, and no¬ 
body accuses us of meanness. 

These miracles are being worked all around us so 
easily and so cheaply that most people have ceased to 
think of them as marvels. There is a photographer es¬ 
tablished in every considerable village,—nay, one may 
not unfrequently see a photographic ambulance standing 
at the wayside upon some vacant lot where it can squat 
unchallenged in the midst of burdock and plantain and 
appIe-Peru, or making a long halt in the middle of a 
common by special permission of the “ Selectmen.” 

We- must not forget the inestimable preciousness of 
the new Promethean gifts because they have become 


3 2 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


familiar. Think first of the privilege we all possess now 
of preserving the lineaments and looks of those dear to 
us. 

“ Blest be the art which can immortalize,” 

said Cowper. But remember how few painted portraits 
really give their subjects. Recollect those wandering 
Thugs of Art whose murderous doings with the brush 
used frequently to involve whole families; who passed 
from one country tavern to another, eating and paint¬ 
ing their way,—feeding a week upon the landlord, an¬ 
other week upon the landlady, and two or three days 
apiece upon the children; as the walls of those hos¬ 
pitable edifices too frequently testify even to the present 
day. Then see what faithful memorials of those whom 
we love and would remember are put into our hands by 
the new art, with the most trifling expenditure of time 
and money. 

This new art is old enough already to have given us 
the portraits of infants who are now growing into ado¬ 
lescence. By-and-by it will show every aspect of life in 
the same individual, from the earliest week to the last 
year of senility. We are beginning to see what it will 
reveal. Children grow into beauty and out of it. The 
first line in the forehead, the first streak in the hair are 
chronicled without malice, but without extenuation. The 
footprints of thought, of passion, of purpose are all 
treasured in these fossilized shadows. Family-traits 
show themselves in early infancy, die out, and reappear. 
Flitting moods which have escaped one pencil of sun¬ 
beams are caught by another. Each new picture gives 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


33 


us a new aspect of our friend; we find he had not one 
face, but many. 

It is hardly too much to say, that those whom we love 
no longer leave us in dying, as they did of old. They 
remain with us just as they appeared in life; they look 
down upon us from our walls; they lie upon our tables; 
they rest upon our bosoms; nay, if we will, we may 
wear their portraits, like signet-rings, upon our fingers. 
Our own eyes lose the images pictured on them. Par¬ 
ents sometimes forget the faces of their own children in 
a separation of a year or two. But the unfading arti¬ 
ficial retina which has looked upon them retains their 
impress, and a fresh sunbeam lays this on the living 
nerve as if it were radiated from the breathing shape. 
How these shadows last, and how their originals fade 
aw T ay! 

What is true of the faces of our friends is still more 
true of the places we have seen and loved. No picture 
produces an impression on the imagination to compare 
with a photographic transcript of the home of our 
childhood, or any scene with which we have been long 
familiar. The very point which the artist omits, in his 
effort to produce general effect, may be exactly the one 
that individualizes the place most strongly to our mem¬ 
ory. There, for instance, is a photographic view of 
our own birthplace, and with it of a part of our good 
old neighbor’s dwelling. An artist would hardly have 
noticed a slender, dry, leafless stalk which traces a faint 
line, as you may see, along the front of our neighbor’s 
house next the corner. That would be nothing to him, 


34 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


—but to us it marks the stem of the honeysuckle-vine, 
which we remember, with its pink and white heavy- 
scented blossoms, as long as we remember the stars in 
heaven. 

To this charm of fidelity in the minutest details the 
stereoscope adds its astonishing illusion of solidity, and 
thus completes the effect which so entrances the im¬ 
agination. Perhaps there is also some half-magnetic 
effect in the fixing of the eyes on the twin pictures,— 
something like Mr. Braid’s hypnotism, of which many of 
our readers have doubtless heard. At least the shut¬ 
ting out of surrounding objects, and the concentration 
of the whole attention, which is a consequence of this, 
produce a dream-like exaltation of the faculties, a kind 
of clairvoyance, in which we seem to leave the body 
behind us and sail away into one strange scene after 
another, like disembodied spirits. 

“Ah, yes,” some unimaginative reader may say; 
“ but there is no color and no motion in these pictures 
you think so life-like; and at best they are but petty 
miniatures of the objects we see in Nature.” 

But color is, after all, a very secondary quality as 
compared with form. We like a good crayon portrait 
better for the most part in black and white than in tints 
of pink and blue and brown. Mr. Gibson has never 
succeeded in making the world like his flesh-colored 
statues. The color of a landscape varies perpetually, 
with the season, with the hour of the day, with the 
weather, and as seen by sunlight or moonlight; yet our 
home stirs us with its old associations, seen in any and 
every light. 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


35 


As to motion, though of course it is not present in 
stereoscopic pictures, except in those toy-contrivances 
which have been lately introduced, yet it is wonderful 
to see how nearly the effect of motion is produced by 
the slight difference of light on the water or on the 
leaves of trees as seen by the two eyes in the double¬ 
picture. 

And lastly with respect to size, the illusion is on the 
part of those who suppose that the eye, unaided, ever 
sees anything but miniatures of objects. Here is a new 
experiment to convince those who have not reflected 
on the subject that the stereoscope shows us objects of 
their natural size. 

We had a stereoscopic view taken by Mr. Soule out 
of our parlor-window, overlooking the town of Cam¬ 
bridge, with the river and the bridge in the foreground. 
Now, placing this view in the stereoscope, and looking 
with the left eye at the right stereographic picture, 
while the right eye looked at the natural landscape, 
through the window where the view was taken, it was 
not difficult so to adjust the photographic and real 
views that one overlapped the other, and then it was 
shown that the two almost exactly coincided in all 
their dimensions. 

Another point in which the stereograph differs from 
every other delineation is in the character of its evi¬ 
dence. A simple photographic picture may be tampered 
with. A lady’s portrait has been known to come out 
of the finishing-artist’s room ten years younger than 
when it left the camera. But try to mend a stereo- 


3 6 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


graph and you will soon find the difference. Your 
marks and patches float above the picture and never 
identify themselves with it. We had occasion to put a 
little cross on the pavement of a double photograph of 
Canterbury Cathedral,—copying another stereoscopic 
picture where it was thus marked. By careful manage¬ 
ment the two crosses were made perfectly to coincide 
in the field of vision, but the image seemed suspended 
above the pavement, and did not absolutely designate 
any one stone, as it would have done, if it had been a 
part of the original picture. The impossibility of the 
stereograph’s perjuring itself is a curious illustration of 
the law of evidence. “ At the mouth of two witnesses, or 
of three, shall he that is worthy of death be put to 
death; but at the mouth of one he shall not be put to 
death.” No woman may be declared youthful on the 
strength of a single photograph; but if the stereoscopic 
twins say she is young, let her be so acknowledged in 
the high court of chancery of the God of Love. 

Some two or three years since, we called the atten¬ 
tion of the readers of this magazine to the subject of 
the stereoscope and the stereograph. Some of our ex¬ 
pressions may have seemed extravagant, as if heated by 
the interest which a curious novelty might not unnat¬ 
urally excite. We have not lost any of the enthusiasm 
and delight which that article must have betrayed. After 
looking over perhaps a hundred thousand stereographs 
and making a collection of about a thousand, we should 
feel the same excitement on receiving a new lot to look 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


37 


over and select from as in those early days of our ex¬ 
perience. To make sure that this early interest has not 
cooled, let us put on record one or two convictions of 
the present moment. 

First, as to the wonderful nature of the invention. If 
a strange planet should happen to come within hail, and 
one of its philosophers were to ask us, as it passed, to 
hand him the most remarkable material product of 
human skill, we should offer him, without a moment’s 
hesitation, a stereoscope containing an instantaneous 
double-view of some great thoroughfare. * * * 

Secondly, of all artificial contrivances for the grati¬ 
fication of human taste, we seriously question whether 
any offers so much, on the whole, to the enjoyment of 
the civilized races as the self-picturing of Art and Na¬ 
ture,—with three exceptions: namely, dress, the most 
universal, architecture, the most imposing, and music, 
the most exciting, of factitious sources of pleasure. 

No matter whether this be an extravagance or an 
over-statement; none can dispute that we have a new 
and wonderful source of pleasure in the sun-picture, 
and especially in the solid sun -sculpture of the stereo¬ 
graph. Yet there is a strange indifference to it, even up 
to the present moment, among many persons of cul¬ 
tivation and taste. They do not seem to have waked 
up to the significance of the miracle which the Lord of 
Light is working for them. The cream of the visible 
creation has been skimmed off; and the sights which 
men risk their lives and spend their money and endure 
sea-sickness to behold,—the views of Nature and Art 


3S 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


which make exiles of entire families for the sake of a 
look at them, and render “ bronchitis ” and dyspepsia, 
followed by leave of absence, endurable dispensations 
to so many worthy shepherds,—these sights, gathered 
from Alps, temples, palaces, pyramids, are offered you 
for a trifle, to carry home with you, that you may look 
at them at your leisure, by your fireside, with perpetual 
fair weatber, when you are in the mood, without catch¬ 
ing cold, without following a valet-de-place, in any 
order of succession,—from a glacier to Vesuvius, from 
Niagara to Memphis,—as long as you like, and break¬ 
ing off as suddenly as you like;—and you, native of this 
incomparably dull planet, have hardly troubled your¬ 
self to look at this divine gift, which, if an angel had 
brought it from some sphere nearer to the central 
throne, would have been thought worthy of the celestial 
messenger to whom it was intrusted! 

It seemed to us that it might possibly awaken an in¬ 
terest in some of our readers, if we should carry them 
with us through a brief stereographic trip,—describing, 
not from places, but from the photographic pictures of 
them which we have in our own collection. Again, 
those who have collections may like to compare their 
own opinions of particular pictures mentioned with 
those here expressed, and those who are buying stereo¬ 
graphs may be glad of some guidance in choosing. 

But the reader must remember that this trip gives 
him only a glimpse of a few scenes selected out of our 
gallery of a thousand. To visit them all, as tourists 
visit the realities, and report what we saw, with the 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


39 


usual explanations and historical illustrations, would 
make a formidable book of travels. 

Before we set out, we must know something of the 
sights of our own country. At least we must see 
Niagara. * * * Thomson’s “ Point View, 28,” would 
be a perfect picture of the Falls in summer, if a lady 
in the foreground had not moved her shawl while the 
pictures were taking, or in the interval between taking 
the two. His winter view, “ Terrapin Tower, 37,” is 
perfection itself. Both he and Evans have taken fine 
views of the rapids, instantaneous, catching the spray 
as it leaped and the clouds overhead. Of Blondin on 
his rope there are numerous views; standing on one 
foot, on his head, carrying a man on his back, and one 
frightful picture, where he hangs by one leg, head down¬ 
ward, over the abyss. The best we have seen is 
Evans’s No. 5, a front view, where every muscle stands 
out in perfect relief, and the symmetry of the most un- 
impressible of mortals is finely shown. It literally 
makes the head swim to fix the eyes on some of these 
pictures. It is a relief to get away from such fearful 
sights and look up at the Old Man of the Mountain. 
There stands the face, without any humanizing help 
from the hand of an artist. Rather an imbecile old gen¬ 
tleman, one would say, with his mouth open; a face 
such as one may see hanging about railway-stations, 
and, what is curious, a New-England style of coun¬ 
tenance. Let us flit again, and just take a look at the 
level sheets of water and broken falls of Trenton,—at 


40 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


the oblong, almost squared arch of the Natural Bridge, 
—at the ruins of the Pemberton Mills, still smoking,— 
and so come to Mr. Barnum’s “ Historical Series.” 
Clark’s Island, with the great rock by which the Pil¬ 
grims “ rested, according to the commandment,” on 
the first Sunday, or Sabbath, as they loved to call it, 
which they passed in the harbor of Plymouth, is the 
most interesting of them all to us. But here are many 
scenes of historical interest connected with the great 
names and events of our past. The Washington Elm, 
at Cambridge, (through the branches of which we saw 
the first sunset we ever looked upon, from this planet, 
at least,) is here in all its magnificent drapery of hang¬ 
ing foliage. Mr. Soule has given another beautiful 
view of it, when stripped t>f its leaves, equally remark¬ 
able for the delicacy of its pendent, hair-like spray. 

We should keep the reader half an hour looking 
through this series, if we did not tear ourselves ab¬ 
ruptly away from it. We are bound for Europe, and 
are to leave via New York immediately. 

Here we are in the main street of the great city. This 
is Mr. Anthony’s miraculous instantaneous view in 
Broadway. It is the Oriental story of the petrified city 
made real to our eyes. The character of it is, perhaps, 
best shown by the use we make of it in our lectures, to 
illustrate the physiology of walking. Every foot is 
caught in its movement with such suddenness that it 
shows as clearly as if quite still. We are surprised to 
see, in one figure, how long the stride is,—in another, 
how much the knee is bent,—in a third, how curiously 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


41 


the heel strikes the ground before the rest of the foot,— 
in all, how singularly the body is accommodated to the 
action of walking. The facts which the brothers Weber, 
laborious German experimenters and observers, had 
carefully worked out on the bony frame, are illustrated 
by the various individuals comprising this moving 
throng. But what a wonder it is, this snatch at the 
central life of a mighty city as it rushed by in all its 
multitudinous complexity of movement! Hundreds of 
objects in this picture could be identified in a court of 
law by their owners. There stands Car No. 33 of the 
Astor House and Twenty-seventh Street Fourth Ave¬ 
nue line. The old woman would miss an apple from 
that pile which you see glistening on her stand. The 
young man whose back is to us could swear to the pat¬ 
tern of his shawl. The gentleman between two others 
will no doubt remember that he had a headache the 
next morning, after this walk he is taking. Notice the 
caution with which the man driving the dapple-gray 
horse in a cart loaded with barrels holds his reins,— 
wide apart, one in each hand. See the shop-boys with 
their bundles, the young fellow with a lighted cigar in 
his hand, as you see by the way he keeps it off from his 
body, the gamin stooping to pick up something in the 
midst of the moving omnibuses, the stout philosophical 
carman sitting on his cart-tail, Newman Noggs by the 
lamp-post at the corner. Nay, look into Car No. 33 
and you may see the passengers;—is that a young 
woman’s face turned toward you looking out of the 
window? * * * What a fearfully suggestive pic- 


42 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


ture! It is a leaf torn from the book of God’s record¬ 
ing angel. What if the sky is one great concave mir¬ 
ror, which reflects the picture of all our doings, and 
photographs every act on which it looks upon dead and 
living surfaces, so that to celestial eyes the stones on 
which we tread are written with our deeds, and the 
leaves of the forest are but undeveloped negatives 
where our summers stand self-recorded for transfer into 
the imperishable record? And what a metaphysical 
puzzle have we here in this simple-looking paradox! 
Is motion but a succession of rests? All is still in this 
picture of universal movement. Take ten thousand 
instantaneous photographs of the great thoroughfare in 
a day; every one of them will be as still as the tableau 
in the “ Enchanted Beauty.” Yet the hurried day’s life 
of Broadway will have been made up of just such still¬ 
nesses. Motion is as rigid as marble, if you only take 
a wink’s worth of it at a time. 

We are all ready to embark now. Here is the harbor; 
and there lies the Great Eastern at anchor,—the biggest 
island that ever got adrift. Stay one moment,—they 
will ask us about secession and the revolted States,—it 
may be as well to take a look at Charleston, for an in¬ 
stant, before we go. 

These three stereographs were sent us by a lady 
now residing in Charleston. The Battery, the famous 
promenade of the Charlestonians, since armed with 
twenty-four-pounders facing Fort Sumter; the interior 
of Fort Moultrie, with the guns spiked by Major Ander- 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


43 


son; and a more extensive view of the same interior, 
with the flag of the seven stars, (corresponding to the 
seven deadly sins,)—the free end of it tied to a gun- 
carriage, as if to prevent the winds of the angry heaven 
from rending it to tatters. In the distance, to the right, 
Fort Sumter, looking remote and inaccessible,—the 
terrible rattle which our foolish little spoiled sister 
Caroline has insisted on getting into her rash hand. 
How ghostly, yet how real, it looms up out of the dim 
atmosphere,—the guns looking over the wall and out 
through the embrasures,—meant for a foreign foe,— 
this very day (April 13th) turned in self-defence against 
the children of those who once fought for liberty at 
Fort Moultrie! It is a sad thought that there a^e 
truths which can be got out of life only by the de¬ 
structive analysis of war. Statesmen deal in proximate 
principles ,—unstable compounds; but war reduces facts 
to their simple elements in its red-hot crucible, with its 
black flux of carbon and sulphur and nitre. Let us turn 
our back on this miserable, even though inevitable, 
fraternal strife, and, closing our eyes for an instant, 
open (hem in London. 

Here we are at the foot of Charing Cross. You re¬ 
member, of course, how this fine equestrian statue of 
Charles I. was condemned to be sold and broken up 
by the Parliament, but was buried and saved by the 
brazier who purchased it, and so reappeared after the 
Restoration. To the left, the familiar words “ Morley’s 
Hotel ” designate an edifice about half windows, where 


44 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


the plebeian traveller may sit and contemplate North¬ 
umberland House opposite, and the straight-tailed lion 
of the Percys surmounting the lofty battlement which 
crowns its broad facade. We could describe and criti- 
size the statue as well as if we stood under it, but other 
travellers have done that. Where are all the people 
that ought to be seen here? Hardly more than three 
or four figures are to be made out; the rest were mov¬ 
ing, and left no images in this slow, old-fashioned pic¬ 
ture,—how unlike the miraculous “ instantaneous ” 
Broadway we were looking at a little while ago! But 
there, cn one side, an omnibus has stopped long enough 
to be caught by the sunbeams. There is a mark on it. 
Try it with a magnifier. 

Charing 

+ 

Strand 

633 . 

Here are the towers of Westminster Abbey. A dead 
failure, as we well remember them,—miserable modern 
excrescences, which shame the noble edifice. We will 
hasten on, and perhaps by-and-by come back and enter 
the cathedral. 

How natural Temple Bar looks, with the loaded coach 
and the cab going through the central arch, and the 
blur of the hurrying throng darkening the small lateral 
ones! A fine old structure,—always reminds a Bos¬ 
tonian of the old arch over which the mysterious Pos¬ 
ton Library was said still to linger out its existence late 
into the present century. But where are the spikes on 
which the rebels’ heads used to grin until their jaws 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


45 


fell off? They must have been ranged along that ledge 
which forms the chord of the arch surmounting the 
triple-gated structure. To the left a woman is spread¬ 
ing an awning before a shop;—a man would do it for 
her here. Ghost of a boy with bundle,—seen with 
right eye only. Other ghosts of passers or loiterers,— 
one of a pretty woman, as we fancy at least, by the way 
she turns her. face to us. To the right, fragments of 
signs, as follow: 

22 

PAT 

CO 

BR 

PR 

What can this be but 229, Patent Combs and Brushes , 
Prout? At any rate, we were looking after Prout’s 
good old establishment, (229, Strand,) which we remem¬ 
bered was close to Temple Bar, when we discovered 
these fragments, the rest being cut off by the limits of 
the picture. 

London Bridge! Less imposing than Waterloo 
Bridge, but a massive pile of masonry, which looks as if 
its rounded piers would defy the Thames as long as 
those of the Bridge of Sant’ Angelo have stemmed the 
Tiber. Figures indistinct or invisible, as usual, in the 
foreground, but farther on a mingled procession of 
coaches, cabs, carts, and people. See the groups in the 
recesses over the piers. The parapet is breast-high;— 
a woman can climb over it, and drop or leap into the 
dark stream lying in deep shadow under the arches. 


4 b 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


Women take this leap often. The angels hear them 
like the splash of drops of blood out of the heart 
of our humanity. In the distance, wharves, storehouses, 
stately edifices, steeples, and rising proudly above them, 
“ like a tall bully,” London Monument. 

Here we are, close to the Monument. Tall, square 
base, with reliefs, fluted columns, queer top;—looks 
like an inverted wineglass with a shaving-brush stand¬ 
ing up on it; representative of flame, probably. Below 
this the square cage in which people who have climbed 
the stairs are standing; seems to be ten or twelve feet 
high, and is barred or wired over. Women used to 
jump off from the Monument as well as from London 
Bridge, before they made the cage safe in this way. 

“Holloa!” said a man standing in the square one 
day, to his companion,—“ there’s the flag coming down 
from the Monument! ” 

“ It’s no flag,” said the other, “ it’s a woman! ” 

Sure enough, and so it was. 

Nobody can mistake the four pepper-boxes, with the 
four weathercocks on them, surmounting the corners of 
a great square castle, a little way from the river’s edge. 
That is the Tower of London. We see it behind the 
masts of sailing-vessels and the chimneys of steamers, 
gray and misty in the distance. Let us come nearer to 
it. Four square towers, crowned by four Oriental¬ 
looking domes, not unlike the lower half of an inverted 
balloon: these towers at the angles of a square building 
with buttressed and battlemented walls, with two ranges 
of round-arched windows on the side towards us. But 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


47 


connected with this building are other towers, round, 
square, octagon, walls with embrasures, moats, loop¬ 
holes, turrets, parapets—looking as if the beef-eaters 
really meant to hold out, if a new army of Boulogne 
should cross over some fine morning. We can’t stop 
to go in and see the lions this morning, for we have 
come in sight of a great dome, and we cannot take our 
eyes away from it. 

That is St. Paul’s, the Boston State-House of Lon¬ 
don. There is a resemblance in effect, but there is a 
difference in dimensions,—to the disadvantage of the 
native edifice, as the reader may see in the plate prefixed 
to Dr. Bigelow’s “ Technology.” The dome itself looks 
light and airy compared to St. Peter’s or the Duomo of 
Florence,—not only absolutely, but comparatively. The 
colonnade on which it rests divides the honors with it. 
It does not brood over the city, as those two others 
over their subject towns. Michel Angelo’s forehead 
repeats itself in the dome of St. Peter’s. Sir Chris¬ 
topher had doubtless a less ample frontal development; 
indeed, the towers he added to Westminster Abbey 
would almost lead us to doubt if he had not a vacancy 
somewhere in his brain. But the dome of the London 
“ State-House ” is very graceful,—so light that it looks 
as if its lineage had been crossed by a spire. Wait until 
wq have gilded the dome of our Boston St. Paul’s be¬ 
fore drawing any comparisons. 

We have seen the outside of London. What do we 
care for the Crescent, and the Horseguards, and Nel¬ 
son’s Monument, and the statue of Achilles, and the 


48 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


new Houses of Parliament? The Abbey, the Tower, 
the Bridge, Temple Bar, the Monument, St. Paul’s: 
these make up the great features of the London we 
dream about. Let us go into the Abbey for a few 
moments. The “ dim religious light ” is pretty good, 
after all. We can read every letter on that mural tablet 
to the memory of “ the most illustrious and most be¬ 
nevolent John Paul Howard, Earl of Stafford,” “a 
Lover of his Country, A Relation to Relations,” (what a 
eulogy and satire in that expression!) and in many ways 
virtuous and honorable, as “ The Countess Dowager, 
in Testimony of her great Affection and Respect to her 
Lord’s Memory,” has commemorated on his monument. 
We can see all the folds of the Duchess of Suffolk’s 
dress, and the meshes of the net that confines her hair, 
as she lies in marble effigy on her sculptured sarcopha¬ 
gus. It looks old to our eyes,—for she was the mother 
of Lady Jane Grey, and died three hundred years ago,— 
but see those two little stone heads lying on their stone 
pillow, just beyond the marble Duchess. They are 
children of Edward III.,—the Black Prince’s baby- 
brothers. They died five hundred years ago,—but what 
are centuries in Westminster Abbey? Under this pil¬ 
lared canopy, her head raised on two stone cushions, 
her fair, still features bordered with the spreading cap 
we know so well in her portraits, lies Mary of Scotland. 
These fresh monuments, protected from the wear of the 
elements, seem to make twenty generations our con¬ 
temporaries. Look at this husband warding off the 
dart which the grim, draped skeleton is aiming at the 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


49 


breast of his fainting wife. Most famous, perhaps, of all 
the statues in the Abbey is this of Joseph Gascoigne 
Nightingale and his Lady, by Roubilliac. You need not 
cross the ocean to see it. It is here, literally to every 
dimple in the back of the falling hand, and every crinkle 
of the vermiculated stone-work. What a curious pleas¬ 
ure it is to puzzle out the inscriptions on the monu¬ 
ments in the background!—for the beauty of your pho¬ 
tograph is, that you may work out minute details with 
the microscope, just as you can with the telescope in 
a distant landscape in Nature. There is a lady, for in¬ 
stance, leaning upon an urn,—suggestive, a little, of 
Morgiana and the forty thieves. Above is a medallion 
of one wearing a full periwig. Now for a half-inch lens 
to make out the specks that seem to b'e letters. 
“ Erected to the Memory of William Pulteney, Earl of 
Bath, by his Brother ”-That will do,—the inscrip¬ 

tion operates as a cold bath to enthusiasm. But here is 
our own personal namesake, the once famous Rear Ad¬ 
miral of the White, whose biography we can find no¬ 
where except in the “ Gentleman’s Magazine,” where 
he devides the glory of the capture of Quebec with 
General Wolfe. A handsome young man with hya- 
cinthine locks, his arms bare and one hand resting on a 
cannon. We remember thinking our namesake’s statue 
one of the most graceful in the Abbey, and have always 
fallen back on the memory of that and of Dryden’s 
Achates of the “ Annus Mirabilis,” as trophies of the 
family. 

Enough of these marbles; there is no end to them; 


5o 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


the walls and floor of the great, many-arched, thousand- 
pillared, sky-lifted cavern are crusted all over with them, 
like stalactites and stalagmites. The vast temple is alive 
with the images of the dead. Kings and queens, nobles, 
statesmen, soldiers, admirals, the great men whose 
deeds we all know, the great writers whose words are 
in all our memories, the brave and the beautiful whose 
fame has shrunk into their epitaphs, are all around us. 
What is the cry for alms that meets us at the door of 
the church to the mute petition of these marble beg¬ 
gars, who ask to warm their cold memories for a mo¬ 
ment in our living hearts? Look up at the mighty 
arches overhead, borne up on tall clustered columns,— 
as if that avenue of Royal Palms we remember in the 
West India Islands (photograph) had been spirited over 
seas and turned into stone. Make your obeisance to 
the august shape of Sir Isaac Newton, reclining like 
a weary swain in the niche at the side of the gorgeous 
screen. Pass through Henry VII.’s Chapel, a temple 
cut like a cameo. Look at the shining oaken stalls of 
the knights See the banners overhead. There is no 
such speaking record of the lapse of time as these ban¬ 
ners,—there is one of them beginning to drop to pieces; 
the long day of a century has decay for its dial- 
shadow. 

We have had a glimpse of London,—let us make an 
excursion to Stratford-on-Avon. 

Here you see the Shakspeare House as it was,— 
wedged in between, and joined to, the “ Swan and 
Maidenhead ” Tavern and a mean and dilapidated brick 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


51 


building, not much worse than itself, however. The 
first improvement (as you see in No. 2) was to pull 
down this brick building. The next (as you see in No. 
3) was to take away the sign and the bay-window of the 
“ Swan and Maidenhead ” and raise two gables out of 
its roof, so as to restore something like its ancient as¬ 
pect. Then a rustic fence was put up and the outside 
arrangements were completed. The cracked and faded 
sign projects as we remember it of old. In No. 1 you 
may read “ The Immortal .hakes peare . . . Born in 
This House ” about as well as if you had been at the 
trouble and expense of going there. 

But here is the back of the house. Did little Will use 
to look out at this window with the bull’s-eye panes? 
Did he use to drink from this old pump, or the well in 
which it stands? Did his shoulders rub against this 
angle of the old house, built with rounded bricks? It 
is a strange picture, and sets us dreaming. Let us go 
in and up-stairs. In this room he was born. They say 
so, and we will believe it. Rough walls, rudely boarded 
floor, wide window with small panes, small bust of him 
between two cactuses in bloom on window-seat. An 
old table covered with prints and stereographs, a 
framed picture, and under it a notice “ Copies of this 
Portrait .the rest, in fine print, can only be con¬ 
jectured. 

Here is the Church of the Holy Trinity, in which he 
lies buried. The trees are bare that surround it; see 
the rooks’ nests in their tops. The Avon is hard by, 
dammed just here, with flood-gates, like a canal. Change 



52 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


the season, if you like,—here are the trees in leaf, and 
in their shadow the tombs and graves of the mute, in¬ 
glorious citizens of Stratford. 

Ah, how natural this interior, with its great stained 
window, its mural monuments, and its slab in the 
pavement with the awful inscription! That we cannot 
see here, but there is the tablet with the bust we know 
so well. But this, after all, is Christ’s temple, not 
Shakspeare’s. Here are the worshippers’ seats,—mark 
how the polished wood glistens,—there is the altar, and 
there the open prayer-book,—you can almost read the 
service from it. Of the many striking things that 
Henry Ward Beecher has said, nothing, perhaps, is 
more impressive than his accounts of his partaking of 
the communion at that altar in the church where Shak- 
speare rests. A memory more divine than his over¬ 
shadowed the place, and he thought of Shakspeare, “ as 
he thought of ten thousand things, without the least 
disturbance of his devotion,” though he was kneeling 
directly over the poet’s dust. 

If you will stroll over to Shottery now with me, we 
can see the Ann Hathaway cottage from four different 
points, which will leave nothing outside of it to be seen. 
Better to look at than to live in. A fearful old place, 
full of small vertebrates that squeak and smaller ar¬ 
ticulates that bite, if its outward promise can be trusted. 
A thick thatch covers it like a coarse-haired hide. It is 
patched together with bricks and timber, and partly 
crusted with scaling plaster. One window has the dia¬ 
mond panes framed in lead, such as we remember see- 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


53 


ing of old in one or two ancient dwellings in the town 
of Cambridge, hard by. In this view a young man is 
sitting, pensive, on the steps which Master William, too 
ardent lover, used to climb with hot haste and descend 
with lingering delay. Young men die, but youth lives. 
Life goes on in the cottage just as it used to three 
hundred years ago. On the rail before the door sits the 
puss of the household, of the fiftieth generation, per¬ 
haps, from that “ harmless, necessary cat ” which 
purred round the poet’s legs as he sat talking love with 
Ann Hathaway. At the foot of the steps is a huge 
basin, and over the rail hangs—a dishcloth, drying. In 
these homely accidents of the very instant, that cut 
across our romantic ideals with the sharp edge of real¬ 
ity, lies one of the ineffable charms of the sun-picture. 
It is a little thing that gives life to a scene or a face; 
portraits are never absolutely alive, because they do not 
wink. 

Come, we are full of Shakspeare; let us go up among 
the hills and see where another poet lived and lies. Here 
is Rydal Mount, the home of Wordsworth. Two-storied, 
ivy-clad, hedge-girdled, dropped into a crease among 
the hills that look down dimly from above, as if they 
were hunting after it as ancient dames hunt after a 
dropped thimble. In these walks he used to go “ boo¬ 
ing about,” as his rustic neighbor had it,—reciting his 
own verses. Here is his grave in Grasmere. A plain 
slab, with nothing but his name. Next him lies Dora, 
his daughter, beneath a taller stone bordered with a 
tracery of ivy, and bearing in relief a lamb and a cross. 


54 


SUN-TAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


Her husband lies next in the range. The three graves 
have just been shorn of their tall grass,—in this other 
view you may see them half-hidden by it. A few flow¬ 
ering stems have escaped the scythe in the first picture, 
and nestle close against the poet’s headstone. Hard 
by sleeps poor Hartley Coleridge, with a slab of free¬ 
stone graven with a cross and a crown of thorns, and 
the legend, “ By thy Cross and Passion, Good Lord, 
deliver us.”* All around are the graves of those whose 
names the world has not known. This view, (302,) 
from above Rydal Mount, is so Claude-like, especially 
in its trees, that one wants the solemn testimony of the 
double-picture to believe it an actual transcript of Na¬ 
ture. Of the other English landscapes we have seen, 
one of the most pleasing on the whole is that marked 
43,—Sweden Bridge, near Ambleside. But do not fail 
to notice St. Mary’s Church (101) in the same moun¬ 
tain-village. It grows out of the ground like a crystal, 
with spur-like gables budding out all the way up its 
spire, as if they were ready to flower into pinnacles, 
like such as have sprung up all over the marble multi¬ 
flora of Milan. 

And as we have been looking at a steeple, let us flit 
away for a moment and pay our reverence at the foot 
of the tallest spire in England,—that of Salisbury Cathe¬ 
dral. Here we see it from below, looking up,—one of 
the most striking pictures ever taken. Look well at it; 

* Miss Martineau, who went to his funeral, and may be supposed to 
describe after a visit to the churchyard, gives the inscription incor¬ 
rectly. Tourists cannot be trusted; stereographs can. 



SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


55 


Chichester has just fallen, and this is a good deal like 
it,—some have thought raised by the same builder. It 
has bent somewhat (as you may see in these other 
views) from the perpendicular; and though it has been 
strengthened with clamps and framework, it must crash 
some day or other, for there has been a great giant tug¬ 
ging at it day and night for five hundred years, and it 
will at last shut up into itself or topple over with a 
sound and thrill that will make the dead knights and 
bishops shake on their stone couches, and be remem¬ 
bered all their days by year-old children. This is the 
first cathedral we ever saw, and none ever so impressed 
us since. Vast, simple, awful in dimensions and height, 
just beginning to grow tall at the point where our 
proudest steeples taper out, it fills the whole soul, per¬ 
vades the vast landscape over which it reigns, and, like 
Niagara and the Alps, abolishes that five- or six-foot 
personality in the beholder which is fostered by keeping 
company with the little life of the day in its little 
dwellings. In the Alps your voice is as the piping of a 
cricket. Under the sheet of Niagara the beating of your 
heart seems too trivial a movement to take reckoning 
of. In the buttressed hollow of one of these palaeozoic 
cathedrals you are ashamed of your ribs, and blush for 
the exiguous pillars of bone on which your breathing 
structure reposes. Before we leave Salisbury, let us 
look for a moment into its cloisters. A green court¬ 
yard, with a covered gallery on its level, opening upon 
it through a series of Gothic arches. You may learn 
more, young American, of the diflference between your 


56 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


civilization and that of the Old World by one look at 
this than from an average lyceum-lecture an hour long. 
Seventy years of life means a great deal to you; how 
little, comparatively, to the dweller in these cloisters! 
You will have seen a city grow up about you, perhaps; 
your whole world will have been changed half a dozen 
times over. What change for him? The cloisters are 
just as when he entered them,—just as they were a 
hundred years ago,—just as they will be a hundred 
years hence. 

These old cathedrals are beyond all comparison what 
are best worth seeing, of man’s handiwork, in Europe. 
How great the delight to be able to bring them, bodily, 
as it were, to our own firesides! A hundred thousand 
pilgrims a year used to visit Canterbury. Now Can¬ 
terbury visits us. See that small white mark on the 
pavement. That marks the place where the slice of 
Thomas a Becket’s skull fell when Reginald Fitz Urse 
struck it off with a “ Ha! ” that seems to echo yet 
through the vaulted arches. And see the broad stairs, 
worn by the pilgrims’ knees as they climbed to the 
martyr’s shrine. For four hundred years this stream of 
worshippers was wearing itself into these stones. But 
there was the place where they knelt before the altar 
called “ Becket’s Crown.” No! the story that those 
deep hollows in the marble were made by the pil¬ 
grims’ knees is too much to believe,—but there are the 
hollows, and that is the story. 

And now, if you would see a perfect gem of the art 
of photography, and at the same time an unquestioned 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


57 


monument of antiquity which no person can behold 
without interest, look upon this,—the monument of the 
Black Prince There is hardly a better piece of work to 
be found. His marble effigy lies within a railing, with 
a sculptured canopy hung over it, like a sounding- 
board. Above this, on a beam stretched between two 
pillars, hang the arms he wore at the Battle of Poitiers, 
—the tabard, the shield, the helmet, the gauntlets, and 
the sheath that held his sword, which weapon it is 
said that Cromwell carried off. The outside casing of 
the shield has broken away, as you observe, but the 
lions or lizards, or whatever they were meant for, and 
the flower-de-luces or plumes may still be seen. The 
metallic scales, if such they were, have partially fallen 
from the tabard, or frock, and the leather shows bare 
in parts of it. 

Here, hard by, is the sarcophagus of Henry IV. and 
his queen, also inclosed with a railing like the other. 
It was opened about thirty years ago, in presence of 
the dean of the cathedral. There was a doubt, so it was 
said, as to the monarch’s body having been really buried 
there. Curiosity had nothing to do with it, it is to be 
presumed. Every over-ground sarcophagus is opened 
sooner or later, as a matter of course. It was hard work 
to get it open; it had to be sawed. They found a quan¬ 
tity of hay ,—fresh herbage, perhaps, when it was laid 
upon the royal body four hundred years ago,—and a 
cross of twigs. A silken mask was on the face. They 
raised it and saw his red beard, his features well pre¬ 
served, a gap in the front-teeth, which there was prob- 


58 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


ably no court-dentist to supply,—the same face the 
citizens looked on four centuries ago 

“ In London streets that coronation-day, 

When Bolingbroke rode on roan Barbary” ; 

then they covered it up to take another nap of a few 
centuries, until another dean has an historical doubt,— 
at last, perhaps, to be transported by some future 
Australian Barnum to the Sidney Museum and ex¬ 
hibited as the mummy of one of the English Pharaohs. 
Look, too, at the “ Warriors’ Chapel,” in the same 
cathedral. It is a very beautiful stereograph, and may 
be studied for a long time, for it is full of the most 
curious monuments. 

Before leaving these English churches and monu¬ 
ments, let us enter, if but for a moment, the famous 
Beauchamp Chapel at Warwick. The finest of the 
views (323, 324) recalls that of the Black Prince’s tomb, 
as a triumph of photography. Thus, while the whole 
effect of the picture is brilliant and harmonious, we 
shall find, on taking a lens, that we can count every in¬ 
dividual bead in the chaplet of the monk who is one 
of the more conspicuous reliefs on the sarcophagus. 
The figure of this monk itself is about half an inch in 
height, and its face may be completely hidden by the 
head of a pin. The whole chapel is a marvel of work¬ 
manship and beauty. The monument of Richard Beau¬ 
champ in the centre, with the frame of brass over the 
recumbent figure, intended to support the drapery 
thrown upon it to protect the statue,—with the mailed 
shape of the warrior, his feet in long-pointed shoes 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


59 


resting against the muzzled bear and the griffin, his 
hands raised, but not joined,—this monument, with 
the tomb of Dudley, Earl of Leicester,—Elizabeth’s 
Leicester,—and that of the other Dudley, Earl of War¬ 
wick,—all enchased in these sculptured walls, and il¬ 
luminated through that pictured window, where we can 
dimly see the outlines of saints and holy maidens,— 
form a group of monumental jewels such as only Henry 
VII.’s Chapel can equal. For these two pictures (323 
and 324) let the poor student pawn his outside-coat, if 
he cannot have them otherwise. 

Of abbeys and castles there is no end. No. 4, Tintern 
Abbey, is the finest, on the whole, we have ever seen. 
No. 2 is also very perfect and interesting. In both, the 
masses of ivy that clothe the ruins are given with won¬ 
derful truth and effect. Some of these views have the 
advantage of being very well colored. Warwick Cas¬ 
tle (81) is one of the best and most interesting of the 
series of castles; Caernarvon is another still more 
striking. 

We may as well break off here as anywhere, so far as 
England is concerned. England is one great burial- 
ground to an American. As islands are built up out of 
the shields of insects, so her soil is made from the bones 
of her innumerable generations. No one but a trav¬ 
elled American feels what it is to live in a land of monu¬ 
ments. We are all born foundlings, except here and 
there, in some favored spot, where humanity has nestled 
for a century or two. Cut flowers of romance and 
poetry stuck about are poor substitutes for the growths 


6o 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


which have their roots in an old soil that has been 
changing elements with men and women like our¬ 
selves for thousands of years. Perhaps it is well that 
we should be forced to live mainly for the future; but 
it is sometimes weary and prosaic. 

And yet,—open this enchanted door (of pasteboard) 
which is the entrance to the land of Burns, and see 
what one man can do to idealize and glorify the com¬ 
mon life about him! Here is a poor “ten-footer,” as 
we should call it, the cottage William “ Burness ” built 
with his own hands, where he carried his young bride 
Agnes, and where the boy Robert, his first-born, was 
given to the light and air which he made brighter and 
freer for mankind. Sit still and do not speak,—but see 
that your eyes do not grow dim as these pictures pass 
before them: The old hawthorn under which Burns sat 
with Highland Mary,—a venerable duenna-like tree, 
with thin arms and sharp elbows, and scanty chevelure 
of leaves; the Auld Brig o’ Doon (No. 4),—a daring 
arch that leaps the sweet stream at a bound, more than 
half clad in n mantle of ivy, which has crept with its 
larva-like feet beyond the key-stone; the Twa Brigs of 
Ayr, with the beautiful reflections in the stream that 
shines under their eyebrow-arches; and poor little Allo- 
way Kirk, with its fallen roof and high gables. Lift your 
hand to your eyes and draw a long breath,—for what 
words would come so near to us as these pictured, nay, 
real, memories of the dead poet who made a nation of a 
province, and the hearts of mankind its tributaries? 

And so we pass to many-towered and turreted and 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


6l 


pinnacled Abbotsford, and to large-windowed Melrose, 
and to peaceful Dryburgh, where, under a plain bev¬ 
elled slab, lies the great Romancer whom Scotland 
holds only second in her affections to her great poet. 
Here in the foreground of the Melrose Abbey view 
(436) is a gravestone which looks as if it might be 
deciphered with a lens. Let us draw out this inscrip¬ 
tion from the black archives of oblivion. Here it is: 

In Memory of 
Francis Cornel, late 
Labourer in Greenwell, 

Who died 11 th July, 1827, 
aged 89 years. Also 
Margaret Betty, his 
Spouse, who died 2 d Dec r , 

1831, aged 89 years. 

This is one charm, as we have said over and over, of the 
truth-telling photograph. We who write in great maga¬ 
zines of course float off from the wreck of our century, 
on our life-preserving articles, to immortality. What a 
delight it is to snatch at the unknown head that shows 
for an instant through the wave, and drag it out to 
personal recognition and a share in our own sempiter¬ 
nal buoyancy! Go and be photographed on the edge 
of the Niagara, O unknown aspirant for human remem¬ 
brance! Do not throw yourself, O traveller, into Etna, 
like Empedocles, but be taken by the camera standing 
on the edge of the crater! Who is that lady in the car¬ 
riage at the door of Burns’s cottage? Who is that gen¬ 
tleman in the shiny hat on the sidewalk in front of the 


62 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


Shakspeare house? Who are those two fair youths 
lying dead on a heap of dead at the trench’s side in the 
cemetery of Melegnano, in that ghastly glass stereo¬ 
graph in our friend Dr. Bigelow’s collection? Some 
Austrian mother has perhaps seen her boy’s features in 
one of those still faces. All these seemingly accidental 
figures are not like the shapes put in by artists to fill 
the blanks in their landscapes, but real breathing per¬ 
sons, or forms that have but lately been breathing, not 
found there by chance, but brought there with a pur¬ 
pose, fulfilling some real human errand, or at least, as 
in the last-mentioned picture, waiting to be buried. 

Before quitting the British Islands, it would be pleas¬ 
ant to wander through the beautiful Vale of Avoca in 
Ireland, and to look on those many exquisite landscapes 
and old ruins and crosses which have been so admira¬ 
bly rendered in the stereograph. There is the Giant’s 
Causeway, too,—not in our own collection, but which 
our friend Mr. Waterston has transplanted with all its 
basaltic columns to his Museum of Art in Chester 
Square. Those we cannot stop to look at now, nor 
these many objects of historical or poetical interest 
which lie before us on our own table. Such are the pic¬ 
tures of Croyland Abbey, where they kept that jolly 
drinking-horn of “ Witlaf, King of the Saxons,” which 
Longfellow has made famous; Bedd-Gelert, the grave 
of the faithful hound immortalized by—nay, who has 
immortalized—William Spencer; the stone that marks 
the spot where William Rufus fell by Tyrrel’s shaft; the 
Lion’s Head in Dove Dale, fit to be compared with our 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


63 


own Old Man of the Mountain; the “ Bowder Stone,” 
or the great boulder of Borrowdale; and many others 
over which we love to dream at idle moments. 

When we began these notes of travel, we meant to 
take our fellow-voyagers over the continent of Europe, 
and perhaps to all the quarters of the globe. We should 
make a book, instead of an article, if we attempted it. 
Let us, instead of this, devote the remaining space to 
an enumeration of a few of the most interesting pictures 
we have met with, many of which may be easily ob¬ 
tained by those who will take the trouble we have taken 
to find them. * * * 

Almost everything from Italy is interesting. The 
ruins of Rome, the statues of the Vatican, the great 
churches, all pass before us, but in a flash, as we are 
expressed by them on our ideal locomotive. Observe: 
next to snow and ice, stone is best rendered in the 
stereograph. Statues are given absolutely well, except 
where there is much foreshojtening to be done, as in 
this of the Torso, where you see the thigh is unnaturally 
lengthened. See the mark on the Dying Gladiator’s 
nose. That is where Michel Angelo mended it. There 
is Hawthorne’s Marble Faun, (the one called of Prax¬ 
iteles,) the Laocoon, the Apollo Belvedere, the Young 
Athlete with the Strigil, the Forum, the Cloaca Max¬ 
ima, the Palace of the Caesars, the bronze Marcus Aure¬ 
lius,—those wonders all the world flocks to see,—the 
God of Light has multiplied them all for you ? and you 
have only to give a paltry fee to his servant to own in 
fee-simple the best sights that earth has to show. 


6 4 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


But look in at Pisa one moment, not for the Leaning 
Tower and the other familiar objects, but for the inte¬ 
rior of the Campo Santo, with its holy earth, its innu¬ 
merable monuments, and the fading frescoes on its 
walls,—see! there are the Three Kings of Andrea Or- 
gagna. And there hang the broken chains that once, 
centuries ago, crossed the Arno,—standing off from the 
wall, so that it seems as if they might clank, if you 
jarred the stereoscope. Tread with us the streets of 
Pompeii for a moment: there are the ruts made by the 
chariots of eighteen hundred years ago,—it is the same 
thing as stooping down and looking at the pavement 
itself. And here is the amphitheatre out of which the 
Pompeians trooped when the ashes began to fall round 
them from Vesuvius. Behold the famous gates of the 
Baptistery at Florence,—but do not overlook the ex¬ 
quisite iron gates of the railing outside; think of them 
as you enter our own Common in Boston from West 
Street, through those portals which are fit for the gates 
of—not paradise. Look at this sugar-temple,—no, it is 
of marble, and is the monument of one of the Scalas at 
Verona. What a place for ghosts that vast palazzo be¬ 
hind it! Shall we stand in Venice on the Bridge of 
Sighs, and then take this stereoscopic gondola and go 
through it from St. Mark’s to the Arsenal? Not now. 
We will only look at the Cathedral,—all the pictures 
under the arches show in our glass stereograph,—at the 
Bronze Horses, the Campanile, the Rialto, and that 
glorious old statue of Bartholomew Colleoni,—the very 
image of what a partisan leader should be, the broad- 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


65 


shouldered, slender-waisted, stern-featured old soldier 
who used to leap into his saddle in full armor, and 
whose men would never follow another leader when he 
died. Well, but there have been soldiers in Italy since 
his day. Here are the encampments of Napoleon’s 
army in the recent campaign. This is the battle-field of 
Magenta with its trampled grass and splintered trees, 
and the fragments of soldiers’ accoutrements lying 
about. 

And here (leaving our own collection for our friend’s 
before-mentioned) here is the great trench in the ceme¬ 
tery of Melegnano, and the heap of dead lying unburied 
at its edge. Look away, young maiden and tender child, 
for this is what war leaves after it. Flung together, like 
sacks of grain, some terribly mutilated, some without 
mark of injury, all or almost all with a still, calm look 
on their faces. The two youths, before referred to, lie in 
the foreground, so simple-looking, so like boys who 
had been overworked and were lying down to sleep, 
that one can hardly see the picture for the tears these 
two fair striplings bring into the eyes. 

The Pope must bless us before we leave Italy. See, 
there he stands on the balcony of St. Peter’s, and a vast 
crowd before him with uncovered heads as he stretches 
his arms and pronounces his benediction. 

Before entering Spain we must look at the Circus of 
Gavarni, a natural amphitheatre in the Pyrenees. It is 
the most picturesque of stereographs, and one of the 
best. As for the Alhambra, we can show that in every 
aspect; and if you do not vote the lions in the court 


66 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


of the same a set of mechanical h****gs and nursery 
bugaboos, we have no skill in entomology. But the 
Giralda, at Seville, is really a grand tower, worth look¬ 
ing at. The Seville Boston-folks consider it the linch¬ 
pin, at least, of this rolling universe. And what a foun¬ 
tain this is in the Infanta’s garden! what shameful 
beasts, swine and others, lying about on their stomachs! 
the whole surmounted by an unclad gentleman squeez¬ 
ing another into the convulsions of a galvanized frog! 
Queer tastes they have in the Old World. At the Foun¬ 
tain of the Ogre in Berne, the giant, or large-mouthed 
private person, upon the top of the column, is eating a 
little infant as one eats a radish, and has plenty more,— 
a whole bunch of such,—in his hand, or about him. 

A voyage down the Rhine shows us nothing better 
than St. Goar, (No. 2257,) every house on each bank 
clean and clear as a crystal. The Heidelberg views are 
admirable;—you see a slight streak in the background 
of this one: we remember seeing just such a streak 
from the castle itself, and being told that it was the 
Rhine, just visible, afar off. The man with the geese in 
the goose-market at Nuremberg gives stone, iron, and 
bronze, each in perfection. 

So we come to quaint Holland, where we see wind¬ 
mills, ponis-levis, canals, galiots, houses with gable-ends 
to the streets and little mirrors outside the windows, 
slanted so as to show the frows inside what is going on. 

We must give up the cathedrals, after all: Santa Maria 
del Fiore, with Brunelleschi’s dome, which Michel An¬ 
gelo wouldn’t copy and couldn’t beat; Milan, aflame 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


67 


with statues, like a thousand-tapered candelabrum; 
Tours, with its embroidered portal, so like the lace of an 
archbishop’s robe; even Notre Dame of Paris, with its 
new spire; Rouen, Amiens, Chartres,—we must give 
them all up. 

Here we are at Athens, looking at the buttressed 
Acropolis and the ruined temples,—the Doric Parthe¬ 
non, the Ionic Erechtheum, the Corinthian temple of 
Jupiter, and the beautiful Caryatides. But see those 
steps cut in the natural rock. Up those steps walked 
the Apostle Paul, and from that summit, Mars Hill, the 
Areopagus, he began his noble address, “Ye men of 
Athens!” 

The Great Pyramid and the Sphinx! Herodotus saw 
them a little fresher, but of unknown antiquity,—far 
more unknown to him than to us. The Colossi of the 
Plain! Mighty monuments of an ancient and proud 
civilization standing alone in a desert now. 

My name is Osymandyas, King of Kings; 

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair ! 

But nothing equals these vast serene faces of the Pha¬ 
raohs on the great rock-temple of Abou Simbel 
(Ipsambul) (No. 1, F. 307). It is the sublimest of stereo¬ 
graphs, as the temple of Kardasay, this loveliest of 
views on. glass, is the most poetical. But here is the 
crocodile lying in wait for us on the sandy bank of the 
Nile, and we must leave Egypt for Syria. 

Damascus makes but a poor show, with its squalid 
houses, and glaring clayed roofs. We always wanted 
to invest in real estate there in Abraham Street or Noah 


68 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 


Place, or some of its well-established thoroughfares, 
but are discouraged since we have had these views of 
the old town. Baalbec does better. See the great 
stones built into the wall there,—the biggest 64 x 13 
x 13! What do you think of that?—a single stone big¬ 
ger than both your parlors thrown into one, and this 
one of three almost alike, built into a wall as if just be¬ 
cause they happened to be lying round, handy! So, 
then, we pass on to Bethlehem, looking like a fortress 
more than a town, all stone and very little window,—to 
Nazareth, with its brick oven-like houses, its tall min¬ 
aret, its cypresses, and the black-mouthed, open tombs, 
with masses of cactus growing at their edge,—to Jeru¬ 
salem,—to the Jordan, every drop of whose waters seems 
to carry a baptismal blessing,—to the Dead Sea,—and 
to the Cedars of Lebanon. Almost everything may have 
changed in these hallowed places, except the face of the 
stream and the lake, and the outlines of hill and valley. 
But as we look across the city to the Mount of Olives, 
we know that these lines which run in graceful curves 
along the horizon are the same that He looked upon as 
Pie turned his eyes sadly over Jerusalem. We know 
that these long declivities, beyond Nazareth, were pic¬ 
tured in the eyes of Mary’s growing boy just as they are 
now in ours sitting here by our own firesides. 

This is no toy, which thus carries us into the very 
presence of all that is most inspiring to the soul in the 
scenes which the world’s heroes and martyrs, and more 
than heroes, more than martyrs, have hallowed and 


SUN-PAINTING AND SUN-SCULPTURE. 69 

solemnized by looking upon. It is no toy: it is a divine 
gift, placed in our hands nominally by science, really 
by that inspiration which is revealing the Almighty 
through the lips of the humble students of Nature. 
Look through it once more before laying it down, but 
not at any earthly sight. In these views, taken through 
the telescopes of De la Rue of London and of Mr. 
Rutherford of New York, and that of the Cambridge 
Observatory by Mr. Whipple of Boston, we see the 
“ spotty globe ” of the moon with all its mountains and 
chasms, its mysterious craters and groove-like valleys. 
This magnificent stereograph by Mr. Whipple was 
taken, the first picture February 7th, the second April 
6th. In this way the change of position gives the solid 
effect of the ordinary stereoscopic views, and the sphere 
rounds itself out so perfectly to the eye that it seems as 
if we could grasp it like an orange. * * * 

We write principally to wake up an interest in a new 
and inexhaustible source of pleasure, and only regret 
that the many pages we have filled can do no more than 
hint the infinite resources which the new art has laid 
open to us all. 


S AVING recognized for some time the import¬ 
ant place that stereoscopic photographs 
must eventually hold, as a means of education, 
we have been sparing no expense nor effort in 
making such series of stereoscopic photographs 
as would bring a person face to face, in a sys¬ 
tematic and comprehensive way, with the life, 
natural conditions and historical remains of the 
most important countries. 

This is a work that has never been attempted 
before. The plan we have followed, as well as 
the success that has attended our efforts, is thus 
stated by a reviewer of our series on Palestine and 
Egypt: 

“ The views are not only of remarkable excellence as 
specimens of photography, but the scenes selected are 
such as to give an adequate representation not only of 
the scenery and architectural monuments of these coun¬ 
tries, but also of the daily life of the people in the streets, 
bazaars, fields, and even in their homes and sanctuaries. 
They are so arranged as to furnish in the case of each 
country a complete and connected tour, and the office of 
a guide is fulfilled by an accompanying volume in which 
every scene presented is described, and its literary and 
historical importance interestingly set forth.” 

Our experienced artists in stereoscopic pho¬ 
tography have also been through taly, Greece, 
Russia, Austria, Switzerland, Japan, Cuba, Porto 
Rico, the Philippines, etc. In fact they have 
stereographed most of the important countries of 
the world. 

Scores of authorities might be quoted here tes¬ 
tifying to the absolute accuracy, the remarkable 
character, and the importance of these series. 
Men who have bought a large number of them 


70 


say that no private, public, or school library is 
complete without them. 

Think a moment about the significance of the 
following statements : 

“ By the use of the stereoscope these scenes are made 
living realities to an extent that is positively startling to 
one who has traveled through the East.”—Frank K. 
Sanders, Ph.D., Yale University. 

“ They are a marvel of realism ; they have taken me 
back to the Nile and brought again under my eyes the 
very scenes I witnessed there as vividly as when I 
watched them on the spot.”—J. Irving Manatt, Ph.D., 
LL.D., Brown University. 

“They are the best substitute for an actual visit to 
those lands that I have ever seen.”—Archibald McCul- 
lagh, D.D., Worcester, Mass. 

“ I have seen nothing so realistic since my visit to the 
Orient.”—C. R. BJackall, D.D., Editor of Periodicals, 
Baptist Publication Society. 

“They are far superior to the old stereoscopic views 
that were so abundant a generation ago. And it (the 
stereoscope) gives not only pictures, but reproductions of 
real scenes, real buildings, and real people, with per¬ 
spective effect of reality that no ordinary photographs 
can bestow.”—Jesse L. Hurlbut, D.D., Editor Sunday- 
school Literature for the Methodist Episcopal Church. 

“ It gives me pleasure to declare that your stereoscopic 
views of Italy and the Holy Land are the best I have 
ever seen.”—Archbishop Ryan, of Philadelphia. 

“The next best thing to visiting them (Rome, Jeru¬ 
salem, etc.) is to have them brought before the eye by 
very perfect stereoscopic views.”—Dr. Theo. L. Cuyler. 

“They afford the only means by which the many who 
can not travel may gain a real acquaintance with other 
lands and peoples.”—William Elder, A.M., Sc.D., Colby 
University. 

After exam ining our stereoscopic views of Switzerland, 
Dr. C. H. Parkhurst wrote : “ I have seen no photographs 
that are their equal.” 

“ I have found these views .... in particular 
to possess an educational value of great importance to 
scholars, students, artists, professional men, and indeed 
to the general public.”—John Clark Ridpath, LL.D., 
New York. 


7i 


Still no commendations, nor any amount of de¬ 
tailed description, would give an adequate con¬ 
ception of a series of stereographs. One must 
put his head in the hood of a stereoscope and see 
before him these scientifically accurate reproduc¬ 
tions of real people, real buildings, and real 
places. It would be as impossible to make one 
see these reproductions by means of words as to 
make one see the actual scenes. 

But it is a fact also that most people who have 
looked at stereographs do not realize what they 
are. People generally have failed to recognize 
the all-important and fundamental difference be¬ 
tween stereoscopic photographs and all other 
photographs or pictures. Original stereoscopic 
photographs are not only original photographs, 
made from original negatives , in the ordinary use 
of these terms—they are vastly more. It should 
be definitely understood that stereographs of 
landscapes or any objects become, when seen 
through the stereoscope, life-size representations 
of those landscapes or objects; they are no 
longer flat surfaces; they have become spaces of 
three dimensions, in which everything stands out 
as in nature. As a help to the realization of this 
startling statement, it should be said that when 
you put your head in the hood of the stereoscope 
you have nothing whatever to do with the two 
photographic prints, three by four inches in size, 
and six inches in front of your eyes, other than as 
two windows through which you look at the scene 
beyond. If you should look through a window 


72 


only a few inches in size, you would not think 
that the large expanse of landscape before you 
must be in miniature because the window was 
small. These may seem like simple statements, 
but they must not be ignored. They are based 
on scientific facts which can be found explained 
in any reliable treatise on binocular vision, such 
as Prof. Le Conte’s “Sight.” Dr. Holmes puts 
the case neatly and accurately when he says that 
in stereographs we get “sun-sculpture,”—in all 
other photographs merely “ sun-painting.” 

And, strange as it may seem, this “life-like¬ 
ness,” this marvelous perfection in three dimen¬ 
sions, of stereoscopic representations has had the 
effect of making the world think of them as a 
novelty, as a means of amusement and entertain¬ 
ment only. But few, even of those who have 
seemed to recognize the great and essential dif¬ 
ference between stereoscopic photographs and all 
other kinds of illustrations, have ever woke up to 
the significance of this difference,—to the greater 
value and possibilities of usefulness thus pos¬ 
sessed by the stereoscopic principle. We can do 
no more than refer to the subject here, for it is 
not a small matter to outline the question “in 
all the immensity of its applications and sugges¬ 
tions. ” 

But we do want to say that if stereographs are 
to serve useful ends they must not be simply 
glanced at for the purpose of satisfying curiosity 
—they must be studied in a serious and intelli¬ 
gent way. This implies at least two things: 


73 


First, a realization that nothing but facts— abso¬ 
lute facts —as to places and people are given 
through the stereoscope; and, secondly, that the 
imagination be aroused while we are looking at 
these facts. We do not mean now that the im¬ 
agination is to be made use of for the purpose of 
forming any fanciful ideas, but simply for the 
purpose of breathing the breath of life into the 
representations and thus making us feel as 
though we were in the presence of the actual 
places or people. 

It is not at all impracticable to say that stereo¬ 
scopic views may thus be to us what the actual 
scene would be, though it might seem so at first. 
Many practical men might be quoted to emphasize 
this important truth, but we will give the state¬ 
ment of only one. The Hon. John L. Bates, 
Speaker of the House, Commonwealth of Massa¬ 
chusetts, writes, under the date of March 15, 
1899: 

“In looking over your stereoscopic photographs it 
seems to me that they give absolutely final facts. They 
are so realistic and natural that one feels as if he is beholding 
the actual scenery; so realistic is the scene made that he 
obtains the inspiration which actual sight gives," 

One trouble is that most people think they are 
using stereoscopic views thus seriously when they 
are not. How many carelessly exclaim, as they 
look at some important place through the stereo¬ 
scope, “Yes, yes ! this is just like being there!” 
etc., when it is nothing like being there to them. If 
they could turn around in their chairs and look at 
the actual place, they would look with an entirely 


74 


different spirit, such as would stir their whole 
being. But if these people would use stereo¬ 
graphs in the right way; if they would put their 
head in the stereoscope, forget their surroundings, 
lose themselves in the study of the facts, the num¬ 
berless details of the marvelously reproduced 
scene before them, then the stereoscopic repre¬ 
sentation would become to them, as Speaker Bates 
says, what the actual scene would be. Dr. Holmes 
gives the strongest evidence in proof of this. 
To him also, looking at a stereograph was, for 
the time being, like looking at the actual place. 
One who reads thoughtfully his preceding articles 
will see how much more is received by a person 
who does look at a stereograph in this way, than 
is received by a person who thinks he is so look¬ 
ing. But most people must make considerable 
effort before they can thus get away from their 
immediate surroundings while looking at a stereo¬ 
scopic view, and feel as they would if looking at 
the scene that is reproduced. This is an end 
worth striving many times to attain. It makes a 
great difference what mood we are in; we can 
often get more out of a book or painting one day 
than we can the next. 

It will always be found that the more a series 
of stereoscopic photographs of a country is 
studied the more valuable it becomes to its pos¬ 
sessor. After a time, if not at first, the stereo- 
graphed places will become as familiar and real 
to us in our thoughts as are the places which we 
have actually visited. And people who come to 


75 


look at stereographs in this way, having in mind 
their true character, will not toss them aside 
after one or two casual examinations, as though 
they had gained all that was to be gained from 
them 

Dr. Holmes’ articles will serve as an excellent 
text-book to show by direction, suggestion and 
example the way to use sterescopic photographs. 
Instead of doubting, or accepting with meaning¬ 
less assent, the facts presented by stereographs, 
Dr. Holmes seized upon them as being as abso¬ 
lutely reliable as those gained by his own eyes. In¬ 
stead of relegating stereographs to the garret or 
the nursery, he realized that they were “ magical ” 
means in their power to give exactly what one 
gets with his own eyes in traveling; that is, not 
alone accurate ideas of places and people, but 
the intellectual stimulus, expansion, growth, and 
the wider charity, which comes from being in the 
presence of such places and people. Instead of 
thinking that he could gain by one or two care¬ 
less examinations all that it would be worth while 
for a man to try to gain from a stereograph, Dr. 
Holmes not only tried by careful study to get all 
the facts that may be gotten from a picture (he 
said it was a mistake to suppose one knows a 
stereoscopic scene when he has studied it a hun¬ 
dred times), but he endeavored, by approaching 
a stereoscopic representation in an appropriate 
mood, away from distracting surroundings, with 
his whole attention concentrated by noting de¬ 
tails, to get his imagination into such a state of 
76 


healthy activity, that representations became 
realities indeed—areal mountain rose before him, 
and he was in the very presence of it; a man in 
Eastern dress and darkened skin stands with him 
by the Nile for a few moments, and ever after 
that man and all his fellows are better known and 
understood. 

Since the imagination has so important a part 
to perform in making us realize and keep in touch 
with things that exist or events that occur outside 
of our immediate surroundings, we turn aside to 
make quotations in regard to it. Ruskin says: 
“We think it a great triumph to get our packages 
and our bodies carried at a fast pace, but we 
never take the slightest trouble to put any pace 
in our perceptions. We usually stay at home in 
thought, or, if we ever mentally see the world, it 
is at the old stage-coach or wagon rate.” 

Prof. Charles Elliot Norton, of Harvard Uni¬ 
versity, writing of “ the highest end of the highest 
education,” that is, the spirit with which a stu¬ 
dent is inspired, says: “To secure this end, one 
means above all is requisite, which, strangely 
enough, has been greatly neglected in our schemes 
of education, namely: the culture of the faculties 
of imagination. The studies that nourish the 
soul, that afford permanent resources of delight 
and recreation, that maintain ideals of conduct 
and develop the sympathies upon which the pro¬ 
gress and welfare of society depend, are the 
studies which quicken and nourish the imagina¬ 
tion and are vivified by it.” 


77 


If we use stereoscopic views as Dr. Holmes did, i 
we shall certainly find them particularly fitted as 
a means of nourishing and quickening the imag¬ 
ination. And, at the same time, however much 
our imaginative faculty may be developed, we 
shall find that they are the means that make it 
easiest—indeed the only means that will make it 
possible—for us to see and feel at home what we 
would see and feel in traveling. The importance 
of the very form of the stereoscope is shown 
here,—the fact that it does individualize, that only 
one can look at a time; that the head must be in 
the hood of the stereoscope. If a person can ever 
forget his immediate surroundings and go in im¬ 
agination to a place, he can do so in this way. 

And, as a final suggestionregarding the way to 
use stereographs, we must remember that people 
have been looking over too many views at one 
sitting—running over them too rapidly. As we 
have seen, the benefit to be derived depends not 
upon the number looked at, but rather upon the 
care with which each one is studied. People 
gallop over stereographs, when they ought to 
creep. To emphasize still further this important 
point, we quote from a letter received from Rev. 
Charles R. Gillett, of Union Theological Sem¬ 
inary: 

“ Your collection of Egyptian views is a source of con¬ 
stant pleasure and delight. Each one of them is a sub¬ 
ject tor study and profit. Their detail and lifelikeness 
are simply marvelous ; the figures stand out from the 
background, as in Nature, and in a way not obtained in 
an ordinary photograph. In fact, one can scarcely do 

78 


justice to a half-dozen views in one evening. To study 
the series attentively and exhaustively is to make a fire¬ 
side itinerary of the land of the Nile." 

Finally, one should be careful as to whose 
stereographs he buys So many stereographs, 
copies of other pictures or poor photographs of 
trifling subjects, have been pushed out by unre¬ 
liable firms, that people have generally come to 
think of stereoscopic views as the least satisfac¬ 
tory of photographs. On the contrary, leading 
artists affirm that photography creates nothing 
more beautiful or serviceable than a stereoscopic 
picture. 

With Underwood & Underwood stereoscopic 
photography has come to be a profession by itself. 
Very few people who admire one of our series of 
a country realize how much skill and experience 
have been required to produce it. The photogra¬ 
phy itself, artistic effects shown in a hundred 
ways, the presence of life, grouping, foreground, 
judgment in knowing what to take as well as what 
not to take, etc.—there are such possibilities in 
all these endless details, that it is entirely impos¬ 
sible for amateurs or firms of little experience or 
means to offer any number of subjects of a coun¬ 
try which are of a high order throughout. 

To this work, our firm is able to bring the 
knowledge and skill acquired by long and suc¬ 
cessful experience in the stereoscopic view busi¬ 
ness. Our stereographs are sold the world over, 
and we can furnish testimonialsfrom such author¬ 
ities as must assure anyone of the excellence and 


79 


absolute trustworthiness of our entire series of 
stereographs. 

“ One cannot afford to forego the keen enjoy¬ 
ment which an examination of these photographs 
yields.” 

UNDERWOOD & UNDERWOOD. 


P D 6 2 


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